Printing speed suggestions?

[ceramicbullet 0]

Hey guys, I'm in the middle of a project for work. I need to get 50 things done in 3 days or less, and this thing is slow as molasses. I cranked up the speed to 200%, it's been 10 minutes and I've had no problems, but it's still pretty slow.

What is the maximum printing speed you guys recommend I not exceed?

[Labern 774]

It depends on a few factors.

Ultimaker recommends you max print speed to be 8mm3/s but a well working machine can print at 10mm3/s

You multiply your nozzle diameter with the layer height and speed to find out what your currently printing at.

pretty much the faster you print the hotter your nozzle temp needs to be. but for PLA don't exceed 240 or it will start to burn.

If you increase the layer height then you are pushing a lot more plastic through the nozzle so this in turn effects the temp and print speed.

telling us 200% doesn't mean much as we don't know your print speed and layer heights etc.. so if you need more advice then you might want to post these.

[yellowshark 153]

It also depends on the quality of the final product you want; the faster you go the lower the quality. Printing more than one model on the bed concurrently can also speed up the overall time - although that does come with other considerations e.g. print too hot and you will suffer stringing. If your feed system is working 100% you will not need to go anywhere near 240 if you are using normal PLA

[tommyph1208 55]

From my experience there are a lot of better ways to decrease print time than upping the parameter that Cura calls "print speed" (or slicing at a default value and turning the nob on your Ulticontroller to multiply this parameter by some factor - Which in essence does the same thing).

Actually, you will often see that it helps very very little, as the printer is limited by other parameters (min. layer time, acceleration, deceleration, travel speed etc. etc.)

One of the best ways to decrease print time is to up the layer height (0.2 mm. layer slices print twice as fast as 0.1 mm. layer slices). Here you are still limited by the maximum amount of plastic the extruder can force through your nozzle (the 8-10 mm3/s that @Labern mentions), but you get around the factors of min. layer time, acceleration, deceleration etc.)

Another good area is the % of infill and amount of support... Go as low as you possibly can, maybe spend an hour to manually add some infill/support to your model in the critical areas that are otherwise forcing you to choose a certain setting.

Another very good trick is to get a bigger nozzle (say 0.6 or even 0.8mm)...

It might not be doable for you if you have started something and have to finish it in 3 days from now and don't have a "nozzle-shop" just around the corner...  But it will allow you to extrude more plastic per second, have one line perimeters where you would otherwise need two, etc.... Rarely does it have an actual high impact on the final quality of the print.

Edited January 12, 2016 by Guest