Slashee_the_Cow

Cura's slicing engine can be funny. And by that I mean incredibly annoying. Often something like moving your model a little bit on the plate can turn a failed slice into a successful one. Or change a setting (almost any setting) slice, and if it's successful, change it back and slice again and it should work.

If it prints fine hollow, then the gap should be correct for printing solid, unless perhaps you're using a different layer height. If that's where it's starting the layer, that could potentially be an issue. There's a lot of settings that can adhesion. Looking at your machine definition, I noticed a couple of things that don't seem right. I don't know if you copied the entire fdmprinter.def.json file and changed a few values or whether that's just what it seems like looking in the 3mf file , but if you did the former then you really should create a custom definition that inherits fdmprinter and only change what you need it to. Anyway, looking at the profile: "machine_max_feedrate_e": { "label": "Maximum Speed E", "children": {}, "description": "The maximum speed of the filament.", "unit": "mm/s", "type": "float", "default_value": "299792458000", "settable_per_mesh": "False", "settable_per_extruder": "False", "settable_per_meshgroup": "False" } "machine_max_acceleration_e": { "label": "Maximum Filament Acceleration", "children": {}, "description": "Maximum acceleration for the motor of the filament.", "unit": "mm/s\u00b2", "type": "float", "default_value": "10000", "settable_per_mesh": "False", "settable_per_extruder": "False", "settable_per_meshgroup": "False" } I don't know how quickly you can extrude clay, but I'd be extremely surprised if it was 83.3km/h. I'd also wager the acceleration won't go nearly as high as 10000mm/s². And looking at your acceleration settings: This is another case of "I don't know if your printer can even pull that off". But I don't accelerate anywhere near that fast with PLA, let alone clay. If it's accelerating too quickly instead of filament staying where it is long enough to adhere it'll just be dragged along by the nozzle.

Always nice to have a happy customer! The first thing that comes to mind when I see those photos is: what do you have your jerk set to? (It might be what the "corner velocity" is in the firmware, I don't know Klipper... in that case I would know what it is) Remember that the nozzle generally isn't dropping filament straight down on the bed, it tends to create a bead on the end of the nozzle which leaves a trail behind it. Jerk affects how much it can change speed instantly at a corner, so if it's too high the trail will just change heading to follow the nozzle at a bit of a diagonal to reach the new line it's printing instead of reaching the corner fully. (Also if it's too high it can make the printer vibrate whenever it rounds a corner which could make a model wobble out of alignment or if your printer isn't tuned correctly, possibly make it slip a step or two on the motor and give you some layer shift.) The traditional downside with having really low jerk (other than the increase in print time) is that it has the potential to cause overextrusion because of how much time the nozzle spends at the corner slowing down and then speeding up again, leaving a blob, but if you have linear advance set up then hopefully it's controlling the flow well enough to prevent that. This is actually my last print. It's really hard to see because... well translucent TPU mostly, and then the forum will crush the image quality when I upload it. I had jerk on that set to 1mm/s. Because it's TPU (squishy and flexible) and very tall and narrow, so did not want anything making it wobble even a little. There are slight blobs on the corners (and there's a whole lot of crap because TPU is annoying as hell to clean up). You can test it that low, of course, obviously TPU behaves pretty differently to PLA or PETG. (120 Slashee points to whoever can correctly identify specifically what the yellow thing in the top left is. Message me your answers, don't want to send the thread off topic)

Plugins should automatically copy over when you first run a new version of Cura. 5axes' plugins seem to have disappeared for me too, so it's not just you. If you have it installed on one computer but not another, on the computer that has it, in Cura go to Help > Show Configuration Folder and copy the "plugins" folder onto a USB drive or whatever. Then on the computer which doesn't have it installed, get to the configuration folder the same way but this time copy the plugins folder from your USB drive, overwriting the one which is already there. Then restart Cura on that computer and the plugins should be there.

It doesn't sound like the shield is your problem, your printer just isn't feeding enough filament. My first guess would be calibrating your E-steps, because that makes for a difference which adds up over time. @GregValiant can give a great explanation for how to do that (and I can't because I've never had to). As a potential mitigation (but not a proper fix), try turning Special Modes > Relative Extrusion on. If your E-steps are off, that will make it so that each movement should only be affected a little bit.

FWIW, you don't have to set the line directions to [90, 90]. Just [90] will work fine, each layer it goes to the next one in the series and then repeats, so you only need one and it'll repeat that.

In Cura, just go to Help > Show Configuration Folder If you'd rather do things the manual way, they're in %APPDATA%\cura There's a folder for each version, first time you run a new version it copies the folder from the most recent previous version.

Just changed Z Seam Position to Right and Seam Corner Preference to None. So yeah, definitely worth testing just either rotating the shoe (or manually entering different Z seam coordinates). I was getting all ready to joke about how you couldn't make one in my size. Then I looked up the build volume of your printer. You could probably pull that off. There's a whole lot of printers that wouldn't.

Edit: Please go down ⬇️ to @ahoeben's post ⬇️ because whenever he corrects me, he's pretty much always right. (In my defence, I've never used Barbarian Units, because I don't live in the country that does) It's probably referring to the bar on the left where the move, rotate, scale, etc. tools live. As you can see, I have a few installed:

Just hit CTRL+N or go to File > New Project to clear what's currently loaded.

For that you'll need to go to the Marketplace and download the awesome "Material Settings" plugin (mandatory shout-out to @ahoeben here): It's possible for materials to have defaults which are hidden by default, but set in the material profile.

"Biased" and "correct" aren't mutually exclusive.

Not if the whole print is relative. If it is then you need to keep track of the tool's location yourself instead of just taking an absolute value and comparing it against the highest and lowest you've seen on that axis. Either way, you'd still have to figure out how to filter out nose wipes. And prime towers. And support. And brims. Can't rely on the code to be as nicely commented as Cura's output is. So to quote one of the great minds of our generation,

I'll give you the same advice as I give anyone who buys an E3V3KE... or almost any recent printer from one of the big Chinese manufacturers. They seem to be in a pissing contest about who can make the fastest printer. You don't want your printer to go fast. Most filaments have guides for the recommended print speed, often on the side of the spool. Unless you're using special high speed PLA you don't want to be going anywhere near max speed. PLA I usually run at about 60mm/s (even though my E3V3SE can go up to 250mm/s, a mere half of what the KE can do). TPU I often go as slow as 20mm/s. In Cura if you go to Speed > Print Speed that's actually pretty confusingly named because it prints the infill at that speed (not so bad because you can't see it) and everything else at half that, so for PLA I set it to 120mm/s, so it does the walls and such at 60mm/s.

No problemo. I always love a happy ending 🙂 I haven't tried many others, but a hear a lot of subreddits about this sort of thing can be pretty brutal. I can't even remember what I originally came here about but now I spend far too much of my free time here helping people 😄

The general guideline for line width is 60-150% of the nozzle diameter, so on a 0.6mm nozzle you could probably go down to 0.36mm (or up to 0.9mm if you wanted to).

Ideally if you could post a Cura project file (.3mf, set it up, then go to File > Save Project) then we can look at the original model and your settings and see if there's anything that stands out, and if not, just play around with the settings until it works and tell you which ones to change 😄

If you're willing to put in a little effort it wouldn't be too hard (from a relative perspective... I already know exactly how I'd do it) to create a Python script which parses the file and remembers the lowest and highest X, Y and Z values. Then you come across a gcode file with relative positioning and start... getting rather displeased at whoever made it.

You can also submit a feature request for it.

This isn't really an "Ender-3 Help Forum" (although apparently UltiMaker support get an overwhelming number of requests for help with other manufacturers' printers just because UM are responsible for Cura). It's probably a blockage somewhere in the system, but there's a few places it can be. It might also not be that. With the demise of 2D printers something had to take over as the device which is impossible to diagnose a problem with and 3D printers were the obvious next step. Best case scenario, hardware wise: clogged Bowden tube. Pull the tube out of the extruder and see if there's anything blocking it. This isn't the only thing a blocked tube can look like, especially if you don't use purple filament, but I love any excuse to break out my macro lens: You can see that some filament might be able to make it through, but it ain't gonna work. Make sure the hardware is cool, then remove the Bowden tube from the hot end. If it looks like there's anything in the tube, cut it back an inch or two behind where the blockage is and reinstall it into the hot end (push it in as far as it'll go) and if it has a retaining clip put it back on. Also, and somewhat worse, hot end is clogged. Fairly simple test, after making sure your Bowden tube has nothing blocking it, just head up the hot end and try to load some filament (something like PLA, not something soft like TPU). If you feel resistance trying to push the filament through the hot end, it's possible there's something clogging the hot end. Fixing that is beyond my knowledge base, sometimes you can remove the Bowden tube, heat up the hot end and have a little poke with something about 1.75mm in diameter and heat resistant, but if you feel much resistance then stop, that's just a slightly fancier version of the "loading the filament" test. If your hot end is clogged, you might be able to try a cold extrusion or you might have to disassemble it. Please seek information from people who know how to do it (i.e. not me) before you try anything like that.

Better? Yes. Hard? Depends how much you know about programming. Time consuming? Hell yes. STL files can be plaintext. Cura project .3mf files are just .zip files which contain the model and all the settings (no, really, rename something from .3mf to .3mf.zip if you want to take a look). Could always write a Python script to generate all the files you wanted 🐍 If you really want to get creative you could always try using AutoHotkey to automatically manually edit the values in Cura 😄 I hate those %^(*ing things. Some cables have sort of a "shroud" around the front of the connector to try and keep the clip in place. Notice I used the word "try". What I don't get is that RJ15 cables use the same kind of clip and I never had this problem with dial-up 😠 Although I guess I didn't have six different modems in the same room so there was less chance to break just because there was less cables. The easiest test for coasting/wiping is to make a cylinder so the Z seam is easily visible (and consistently placed). Doesn't have to be very tall (a few mm should have a consistent Z seam except for the first layer or two) and not huge (*/me struggles to find real world item to compare to*), about the diameter of an analog stick on a game controller, maybe a little bigger. I would have said "about the size of a 50 cent coin" but I'm assuming most people aren't familiar enough with Australian currency to know how big that is. Also the coin itself isn't actually round (it's a dodecagon - 12 sides) even though all our other coins are round. Also it's by far the biggest, even though it isn't the most valuable (the most valuable is about the size of the second least valuable one but thicker). It's the biggest currency mystery since "why would a country still make notes bills out of paper?"

It's not a new setting. The skirt height setting was added in 5.4.0. But yeah, just change skirt height to 1 and it'll draw a skirt (which is more just to make sure your filament is adhering, and possibly get rid of any crud in the system, doesn't help the model at all) only on the build plate. I have no idea why the default is 3.

I think the problem is that the holders don't quite line up with the base, at least once they're rounded to the nearest layer height and line width, as they're separate objects in the STL. If you turn on Mesh Fixes > Remove All Holes then that makes the holders merge with the main part of model: If you set Experimental > Slicing Tolerance to Inclusive then that makes sure all models are at least as big as they are in STL so it treats them as separate objects but it rounds up so that the ring holders definitely fit in the holes: and rounds up the layers so there's no missing layer (orthographic view): Of the two, I would pick the Remove All Holes option. It'll give you a cleaner looking print.

My suggestion of a test using regular PLA as both filaments stands, regardless of the quality of the model.

No, there's a new member of the family (the not confusingly at all named Ender-3 V3, which goes great when you already have the Ender-3 V3 SE and Ender-3 V3 KE, and now there's also the Ender-3 V3 Plus). I think they're referring to my (apparently rather popular) post where I originally posted the links to the E3V3SE profile in GitHub (and then later made a download to make things easier) after they got pulled in to the main source tree but before the next major release, so you could get the "official" profile without waiting for 5.6 to come out.