Any ideas on improving print quality?

[brentwerder 12]

Hey everyone!

I recently tried printing the 3DBenchy torture test boat, and I think it turned out pretty well! On the front of the boat, it tackled the overhang there with no problem. I looked pretty hard to find any surface artifacts there, and, surprisingly, found absolutely zero messups. When it got to the top half of the print, however, several things (minor, albeit annoying) went wrong. I noticed that there was a ton of stringing on the walls on the top of the boat, and there were some little tiny surface artifacts on a few of the features. While this isn't the end of the world for any print, I'd like to see if anybody knows any tricks to getting rid of these little buggers.

Also, right when the print was finishing up, and it was working on the chimney of the boat, a really weird thing happened. The plastic started to drip off of the side of the chimney. It looked like some extreme overhang stringing, but the overhang it was doing was absolutely tiny. This is kind of worrying - I don't know why it happened, or if it'll happen again, but hopefully some of you know what (if anything) I'm doing wrong.

Here's the specs of the print I was doing -

100% fan

20% infill

50 micron layer height

50mm/s

No support

Used Ultimaker Silver PLA

Printed on Ultimaker Original +

Thanks for reading,

-Brent

[DidierKlein 673]

To reduce stringing, print colder and increase travel speed on my UM2 i go up to 250mm/s

I would also increase layer height to 0.1mm, the problem you had on the chimney probably comes from the small layer height. The previous layers don't have enough time to cool so they melt when the next layers are printed.

[danilius 117]

Or, to avoid stringing, print two at the same time, or print a wipe tower as well. @DidierKlein is correct about the chimney; the plastic simply stays liquid in such a small area, and gets shoved around and messy. If you watch the chimney printing (assuming you are printing one boat by itself) and you will see how the nozzle moves the plastic around almost like dough.

Avoid using coll lift-off as the nozzle will dribble while waiting to print the next layer, so instead print a wipe tower. This will get around the whole problem.

[brentwerder 12]

Thanks for the replies - I'll definitely try the increased travel speed and wipe tower. However, I'm not too sure about the .1 mm layers. I really liked the sheen on the boat when I did .05 mm height - the wipe off tower sounds like a good solution for that. Do you usually just load in a separate STL for the tower, or is there a setting in Cura I'm missing? I'll do a little more research on that and post the results.

[danilius 117]

I just add a cylinder in a judiciously selected location. Sometimes the location makes a difference, sometimes not. Takes experience to judge that.