GregValiant

"...I think they have a whole department devoted to making things difficult to use..." . Yes they do. A special department for things like "Everybody is used to that so let's change it." and then the supervisor steps in and says "Not enough confusion. Let's move it to a different menu too." The world didn't need anything beyond Windows XP, and Excel and Word 5.0. Enough. The lock fittings that hold the bowden tube in place have little knife-like teeth built in that grip the tube. As the print head moves back and forth on the X beam the tube rotates in the hot end fitting. Those little teeth keep going deeper, retractions and primes push and pull the tube, and pretty soon it's sliding up and down and there is a gap between the end of the tube and the nozzle. Hot plastic gets pulled into the gap and forms a sort of O-ring seal around the incoming filament. Extrusion starts to suffer, but the problem is rarely bad enough to cause missed steps by the extruders. It's just an under-extrusion problem. I don't think I've ever had an actual clogged nozzle. Hot end? Oh yeah. So you need to warm up the hot end to 200 or so, pull the filament, pull the bowden out of the hot end, carefully remove the nozzle without burning yourself (using a proper wrench and not a pair of pliers). Then you can shove a properly sized piece of coat-hanger or bailing wire down through the hot end to push out the plug of plastic that is probably in there. (You can use a 300mm piece of filament as a pusher but you have to move fast as the hot end will tend to melt the pusher piece.) Cut 5mm's off the bowden tube. The cut you make must be as exactly square as you can get it. I use an old heat break from a previous hot end as a razor guide. Single edge safety razors are the best tool for trimming the bowden. Put the nozzle back in. Gently tighten it and then back it out 1/2 turn. Push the bowden in down tight to the back end of the nozzle, then lift the little flange of the locking ring and put the plastic clip in place to hold the lock ring up. Then gently tighten the nozzle that last 1/2 turn to snug it up to the bowden tube. That whole process is regular maintenance. Bowden tubes are a consumable item but they only need to be trimmed back about 5 or 6mm each time. I get about 40 hours of printing before it starts to act up. I always do the maintenance before I start a long print.

That gcode looks good. After the print starts there is one hot end temperature M104 S210 line at line 348 in the gcode. That may be a problem as it does not call out the Tool Number. If you haven't done so, go to the MarketPlace and load the "Printer Settings" plugin. Then quit Cura and restart. Within "Printer Settings" is "Always Write Active Tool". Enable that and try again. I've been assuming that you have two distinct extruders/hot ends and NOT a "multi-in-1 out" hot end. If my assumption is wrong then there are a couple more settings for you to enable in Printer Settings. "Extruders Share Heater" and "Extruders Share Nozzle" are for those "Multi-In - 1 Out" printers like the Geeetech M and T models.

This is from the last gcode file you posted... .... M126 S[fan_speed_pwm] M140 S[bed0_temperature] T0 ..... M104 S[extruder1_temperature] T1 ..... There is a bug in the Machine Settings dialog. After making changes to the StartUp Gcode you must click in the Ending Gcode box in order to save the settings. Then you can close the dialog. No matter which you change (Start or End gcode) if you don't click on the other text box then the changes do not get saved when you close the dialog. There is a bug report for this on GitHub. This started in Cura 5.0 when the dialog boxes were changed from the Qt5 controls to Qt6 controls. So it appears that the StartUp gcode is the same as it was previously and Cura is not making the replacements from "Keywords" to "Settings Values". I think what is happening is that the printer is seeing a line like "M140 S[bed0_temperature] T0" which it can't understand and (in that case) is setting the bed to "0". The same sort of thing is happening to the hot end temperature with that M104 line. You can check that by opening the gcode file and manually changing the lines to "M140 S60 T0" and "M104 S210 T1" and then try printing it again. You can abort after it starts to print.

The model has errors in it but that doesn't mean it has to be scrapped. The errors might be because surfaces have their "normals" flipped or it might have open edges (non-watertight) or it might have holes (like appears to be going on one the ears). Cura can't figure out what is going on so those areas with errors can't slice. You can go to the Cura MarketPlace and load the Mesh Tools plugin. It has analysis capability and a couple of repair utilities that are basic but work for a lot of models. It has other capabilities as well. You can try to fix them in Blender (but I don't know Blender). MS 3D Builder is bundled with Windows and has a good repair utility that runs automatically when you load a file. There are also on-line STL repair utilities like https://formware.co/OnlineStlRepair. Some files just can't be fixed though. At that point you would need to try again in CAD.

Layer height is the Z resolution. Line Width is the XY resolution. Print speed is important but you will be hitting "Minimum Layer Time" and so that will limit the print speed to whatever you have set for a minimum. It might be more advantageous to print 3 or 4 at once. That would allow the printer to maintain something closer to "Print Speed" and allow each of those little models more time to cool. Printing a single model at very low layer height would be tougher to adjust the speed, which determines the flow rate of plastic through the nozzle, and consequently the "nozzle pressure" would be very low. Your flow rate would be in the neighborhood of 1/10's of a mm³/sec. I'm not a Ultimaker guy but that would seem to be a tough rate to control accurately.

Bug reports are made on GITHUB. That 3mf file is a good example so you can just ZIP it and post it along with your video GIF and verbal report. I'm one of the "greeters" there so I'll add a comment and my CAD workup as well.

It looks like you copied that from SimpliFy3D. Cura uses a different keywords and curly brackets. When the gcode is created Cura understands the "M104 S" but doesn't understand the SimpliFy keywords in square brackets. This line has to be hardcoded as Cura has no keyword in PWM. M126 S[fan_speed_pwm] You could change it to M126 S128 and your cooling fan would start at 50% speed. An option would be to remove it and let Cura add the fan lines later. These two lines are wrong M140 S[bed0_temperature] T0 M104 S[extruder1_temperature] T1 Change them to: M140 S{material_bed_temperature_layer_0} T0 M104 S{material_print_temperature_layer_0} T1 That gcode looks to be for a single extruder print as T0 isn't called to heat up. You might have to make further changes to insure that it's up to temperature for a print that uses it. The Cura keywords are HERE.

With the model loaded select "File | Save Project" and post the 3mf file here. It's the best way to troubleshoot something like this. You can try going to the Mesh Fixes settings and de-select all the check boxes. It could be something like Horizontal Expansion as well.

That will work. You can check Thingiverse.com Have you tried that app I sent? It has leveling commands to send the head around the build plate so you don't have to use the knob. I use baking "parchment paper" as it's only about .05mm thick and nothing sticks to it. A paper store receipt works well too.

With the models loaded in Cura and ready to slice, use the "File | Save Project" command and then post the 3mf file here. It almost looks like the mating surfaces of the models aren't flat. That would have been hard to do in Fusion, but something is going on. I would suggest that you get rid of the locating pins as they are too easy to break off. Instead, put mating holes in that piece and glue in short pieces of wood dowels as the pins.

Check the setting for "Wall Order". If it is "Outside to Inside" then change it to "Inside to Outside". There is nowhere to hide the Z seam on a cylindrical or spherical object. If you use the "File | Save Project" command and post the 3mf file here someone will take a look. Remember though, Z seams are like belly buttons, everybody has one. Some (like mine) are just cuter than others.

When you select the "Cubic Subdivision" infill pattern the setting "Gradual Infill Steps" gets hidden but it's value remains the same. In your case it is set to "5". I'm wondering if Cura is using the value even though it appears it should not. I noticed that the setting "Cubic Subdivision Shell" that becomes available appears to have little to no effect. Slicing the model as received (no changes) resulted in a file 854,528 lines for the print and 50021 seconds print time. Slicing the model with Gradual Infill Steps at 0 resulted in a file 574,721 lines for the print and 36131 seconds print time. That's 300,000 more moves (and ~3:45 longer to print) in a file that I would have thought would be simpler with less moves. I also checked the 2nd file I sliced by reading it into AutoCad. There are very few double/triple/quadruple lines. It would appear that is where a large part of the difference between those two files is. So one thing you can do to make a difference is to enable "Grid" as the infill pattern and then set "Gradual Infill Steps" to "0" and then switch back to Cubic Subdivision. That's how I got the file size down.

Cura 5.0 is considerably different than the 4.X versions. The "Tree Support Branch Diameter Angle" is too large for that model. Where the support comes out of the trigger hole to support the trigger guard there isn't enough room with the setting at 5.0. Try it at 3.0. You might also want to change the "Tree Support Collision Resolution to 0.2. The image below is layer 132 with those changes. You can see that the supports growing out of the trigger hole are much more robust and are now connected to the lower portion. When I import only the model I get the "Not watertight" warning. The model needs repairs. For myself, I would prefer to use "Normal" supports "Everywhere" on this particular model. I think they would do a better job.

I'm decent with gcode and OK with the slicing side of Cura. When it comes to issues that might involve operating systems and video subsystems I would be way out of my depth. The same goes for deciphering Cura.log files. There are people here who know that side in and out. They will get to this when they have a chance. They work on the software as well so you have to wait for them to come up for air.

A fella named "Chuck Hellebuyck" (CHEP) has a YouTube channel he calls Filament Fridays. He is very Creality specific and has this video on proper assembly of the Ender 3 Pro. A carpenters tri-square, a steel straightedge, and a good caliper are the necessary tools. Setting things up to take measurements can be a bit tricky. I sat my printer on a granite countertop and was able to shim the rubber feet with pieces of paper until the two base extrusions were parallel then I went to work making sure that everything was square and plumb.

My hot end and bed can't agree on what room temperature is. When you get the new printer set up we can go over the calibration steps for the various motors and hot end. The bed is what it is. If your are reading that much below the set point then you can make adjustments by setting a higher temperature in Cura. Because of it's mass and the fact that the build surface doesn't contact the metal plate perfectly, there are going to be variations. It's one of the reasons I prefer the glass build surface. The number one most important calibration step is putting the printer together so all three axes are exactly square to each other. Do not assume that since it comes partially assembled that those "partial assemblies" were in fact assembled correctly. It is safer to assume that they were not. My Y axis was off from the X by 3° and off from the Z by 2°. It only takes a few minutes to loosen some screws and square things up.

"USB is pretty robust, unlike things like RS-232" But in the case of 3D printers (most anyway) what we deal with is a USB port configured as an RS-232 emulator. It's acting as a serial port. Over-runs and under-runs remain a possibility. I mentioned the "M1" issue. Cura and Pronterface both sent M105 at timed intervals and would check the printer response to insure that the port was open and active. If the receive buffer on the printer was almost, but not quite full, the M105 gets truncated to M1 which is "Emergency Stop". You look at your printer and it has halted with "Click to resume..." on the LCD. Octoprint/RaspberryPI work well for remote printing. The SD card is simple and is what the printer was really designed to read from. When the printer needs another line of code it grabs it. There is no need to sync the speed of transmission through the USB to the printers appetite for lines of gcode.

I can tell you what's going on, but not why. This is an image of your layer at Z=12.0. The circles are drawn around what appear to be simply the ends of extrusion lines. (I know my red text sucks but I'm too lazy for a re-do.) The text indicates how many ENTIRE lines are within each circle. It does not count the full lines that extend outside of the circle. In a normal situation the count should have been either ZERO or ONE complete line within the circles. You can see that in the top right circle there are 27 line segments piled on top of each other all at the same Z. You may have found something here. @nallath could you take a look?. It appears that there is a lot of wasted motion going on and I don't see anything in the Cura Preview because all the lines are colinear. It sure looks like this is what's happening in the OP's GIF video. Cubic Subdivision Infill. ("Gradual Infill Steps" = 5 but is not visible with Cubic Subdivision.)

Load the model in Cura. Set the "Infill Density" to 100% and slice. You could also set the "Wall Count" to a very high number (50?) You could set the "Top/Bottom Layers" to a high number (500?). Any of those would achieve the same result. The difference would be in the extrusion pattern used on the inside. The best file to troubleshoot with is a project file. It will contain: your printer, the model, and your current settings. You can produce one by using the "File | Save Project" command in Cura. Then post that 3mf file here.

Indeed. It was either a hair raising experience, or you've printed a world class spaghetti wig.

Maybe you don't need an engineer. Maybe you need a voodoo witch doctor or an exorcist. With the memory card out it can't print anything. If it's stuck-on-stoopid (technical term) then I guess it could be running around trying to Auto-Level. Try sprinkling some chicken bones on the build plate and then jump around while playing Black Sabbath "Paranoia" as loud as you can get it. It can't hurt. You can also make up a text file with two lines: M502 ;factory reset M500 ;save settings Save it as a gcode file and print it. It might work and it would be easier on the ears.

Yeah, you can't print over air. The gray print needed supports in a few places, notably the underside of the left forearm. You can see that the sword could have used support as well. The gold print has a lot more vertical portions and the plastic tended to stay where it was put. I tell ya what, post that STL of the gray print and I'll take a shot at slicing it. I can pass back a project file and you can open it in Cura to see what I came up with.

That emoticon will work. My app isn't a slicer. It just sends Gcode commands (basically macros) to the printer over the USB. You can adjust the bed and hot end temperatures, flow rate, feed rate, and cooling fan speed during a print. In addition it has homing commands and "leveling" commands that move the print head. All printing is done from the files on the SD card in the printer. If you have a USB data cable, plug the printer into your computer, and start my app. It should find the Com Port and open it. After that, hit the "Home All" button and just play around. It's not like you can break anything. With the SD card in the computer, select "Get Long Names from Removeable Drive". That will populate the drop down list. Then stick the SD card into the printer and select "1. Initialize SD", then "2. Get File Names", then "3. Import File Names". Then in the dropdown box "4." select a file you want to print. My older printer gets populated with the DOS 8.3 file names. You'll see that the box below has the full file name, you could select the name there and it will adjust the "Print" box.

Here is a snippet from the gcode file: M190 S55 ; Set bed temperature and wait G28 ; Home all axis ; Uncomment the line below to enable ABL Mesh probing ;G29 ; Probe bed mesh for ABL ; For best results do not run nozzle heater while performing ABL G1 Z5.0 ; Raise nozzle to prevent scratching of heat bed G1 X0 Y0 ; Move nozzle to Home before heating M109 S200 T0 ; Set nozzle temp and wait Those lines are part of your startup gcode. The temperature lines "M109" and M190" are there. It looks like it should work to me. I ran it through my Ender in debug mode and it worked. In Cura if you go to Manage Printers and then Machine Settings you should see lines like this in your StartUp Gcode: M190 S{material_bed_temperature_layer_0} and M109 S{material_print_temperature_layer_0} Because they call out the temperatures in StartUp then Cura doesn't add the M104 and M140 lines prior to the startup as they aren't needed.

Post one of the 5.0 gcodes that isn't working. The temperatures might be called out in your StartUp Gcode. If they aren't then Cura should add them before the StartUp Gcode runs. If you open a 3mf project file it's possible to over-write the StartUp Gcode of your printer definition.