dbrandwood

While I do appreciate the constructive criticism/help on the model issues, it's not really those that are the issue here, it's the bloody great globules of molten filament I need rid off on the towers and with all due respect there's been no comment on that other than the disbelief they hold up when being hit by the nozzle. I was more hoping someone could help me resolve these. The code I loaded up does have a temp difference, it was originally like this as from temp towers the two differences where the best settings for each filament but then, I had my blobs issue. I manually changed all M104's to the same temperature in the hope it would stop the pausing over the tower at filament changes but it didn't. I still have the pause, it still oozes excess material in the same spot. What I'd really like is for it to ooze in the empty centre of the tower and wipe on it's way out and that is what this post is about really rather than trying to fine tune my model.

Hope it helps. be nice if you could figure out the issue, it's doing my head in lol GA_12th Dock Base.gcode

Thank you for your analysis of the model and I it may not be perfect but the misalignments are microns and in Inventor the two models are aligned to more than 4 decimal places (in millimetres at that) via planes so maybe that's a Cura issue too, the alignment when merged in the program but we digress and I can live with the miniscule misalignment as it certainly isn't the problem. As I'm the one who's been seeing this happen I know full well it's not the model causing issues. If I sit around and melt the blobs away while it creates them with a flame and flatten each one, the model prints beautify and the misalignments you've noted aren't visible without a magnifying glass. When I say the blobs are the issue, you (well, I actually) know it, they go with a hell of thump, the whole machine judders and it's ALWAYS when it set's off on the return to the print job. If I get chance I'll see if I can catch it on video this weekend. I know it sounds like I'm exaggerating but believe I'm not. Also it's definitely an issue related to Cura towers, it NEVER happens when it's coded in Prusaslicer, their rectangular towers give me no grief what so ever, however, as I've previous said for whatever reason I just can't seem to get Prusaslicer to dial in the quality of print I can get in Cura hence why I want to do them in Cura and not Prusaslicer. What would be perfect is Cura doing a tower like Prusaslicer as it never pauses over the tower and thus does ooze whacking great snot ball over the tower, but that's not going to happen any time soon lol. Maybe if Cura had this pause over the entre opening in the tower then wiped on it's way outward would be the answer. I'm simply looking a resolution I didn't have with the CR-X but only applies to these damned A10M's. I'm not blaming Cura, If I'm doing something wrong I'd just like to learn how to correct it

Hi guys, Firstly, apologies for my "purge tower" description but you obviously understood what I meant, I'll just decribe it as tower from now on. Thanks for the responses. Whatever is giving it's not the bedplate. I have two Geeetech A10M's (you're right, cheap compare to a S5 but trying to find a decent dual colour printer sub £500 isn't easy, one is a standard stick-one sheet that comes with the unit, the other is a magnetic bed with a PEI plate, on only one occasion did the PEI plate move, practically ripped the plate off the magnet. I'm not joking about the tower not budging, it's rock solid. Especially on the stick on bed plate. I don't know what Geeetech use but my prints (and tower) are so well adhered I have to use a craft knife blade to get them off the bed (before your ask, no my Z offset isn't too low, even after the bed has cooled back to ambient temperature). I used to have issues with the towers knocking over but I increased the size to about 35 diameter and put a brim on them and haven't had much of a problem with that since. As for retraction I've turned it off, a peculiarity of the A10M is if your filament is retracted, the other side fills the gap and just causes jams as the two are so close to the nozzle. I know exactly what you mean about getting blobs, I had a CR-X until it died and this used to leave a length of filament on the tower about a millimeter in diameter and about 5mm long on every swap, almost looked like a sonic the hedgehog but these are definite round blobs about 6-7mm spherical diameter. I've no video but I have attached a 3mf file if it helps First attempt failed but would let me delete it so tried again so there may be two attached). GA_R3_14th Silver Dock Base.3mf Dock Base Apr24.3mf

Most people seem to have issues with towers toppling over. hat's not my issue. I'm printing a piece and it has a band of a different colour mid-way up and another near the top. My problem is when this colour change occurs it's leaving big blobs of filament from the band colour on the edge of the tower, each layer in a slightly different position around the edge of the tower so eventually there's a few rings of these blobs. What seems to be happening is when the band colour comes in, the hotend pauses over the the edge of the tower, after purging the filament, the tip oozes and a blob forms, the hotend then goes on to do the new layer, the blob then cools. My problem then becomes that at some point during this repeating process the hot end catches on one of these blobs which protrude above the current layer height of the tower with such force that it either moves the magnetic bed plate of it skips a tooth on the drive belt then from that point on I have a step the alignment of print (see picture) and the print is ruined. sometimes it dislodges so much it's printing in mid air for part of the print and then the old birds nest appears. It never blobs on the primary colour, only the secondary colour. I've tried different filaments, same issue, The first couple of times it happened I had the filaments at different temperatures (only 5 degrees) and I thought the temperature change was what was causing the pause. So I matched the temperatures of both filaments but I still get the pause, the resulting oozing and the inevitable blobs which in turns results in the bed shift. My towers are solid, they don't fall over but they're still causing me a great deal of grief and many a ruined print. I tried swapping to Prusaslicer, the towers are far superior but I just can't seem to dial in the print settings to get as good a print finish as I can in Cura. I a perfect world I'd have Cura but with Prusaslicer's towers, Alas not an option, can some please tell me where I'm going wrong with Cura.

Hmm, not a perfect solution but a sound idea, as a stop-gap it might just work, a bit fiddly modelling but something worth a shot at.

A lot of printers are set NOT to go below what it classes as zero, the issue effects those trying to setup BL touch's etc, a M211 S0 disables the limit (M211 S1 puts the limit back on) However, use extreme caution as it's easy to slam your nozzle into the bed if you get it wrong

If I remember correctly, I read that if your computer goes into standby it breaks the link to your printer.. turn off your PC's energy saving settings so your PC stays on should cure the issue.

I have a (now dead) CR-X printer which printed the two colours great (well, with not many issues) however, as I said, it's now deceased. In it's place I bought a Geeetech A10M (don't laugh, I regret it but that's another story) Anyone who's owned one will tell you it's a complete cow for jamming. If you're printing a dual colour print that changes colour very often things work okay but if you want to print a dual colour print where it's quite some time before the second colour is required you'll find that the first colour has crept up bowden tube of the second extruder, cooled and set rendering the second colour inoperative as it can't feed. What I think may cure my problem is if I could print both colours in the tower on each layer, Say extruder one on an outer ring and extruder two on an inner ring. Yes, it would waste a good amount of filament but just may cure the issue with the A10M jamming as the colours would both be used regularly and swapped throughout the print, is this possible and if so how?