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Do lower speeds make better prints?


plabick

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Posted (edited) · Do lower speeds make better prints?

If I have the time, does it make sense to lower my print speeds down to 15mm/s? Does it make a difference over 30 or 50 mm/s? Will printing slower than 15mm/s make for even better prints? Assuming I have all the time in the world what speed would I want to print at for accurate and good prints?

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Posted · Do lower speeds make better prints?

Hello,

If you have big prints, which are taking the whole building plattform, i got better results when i printed slower.

If you have tiny things to print, it doesnt matter.... there i give 50mm/s and the prints are fine.

This is my experience, i tested it out and yeah...

also on bridging i would recommend a slow print speed (20mm/s) then you are fine.

i hope i helped you and good luck Maker ;)

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    Posted · Do lower speeds make better prints?

    Hi there,

    Generally slower printing produces better results, but the is a limit. It is possible to go too slow. The speed also depends on the material used. For PLA and most other common material, 50mm/s is good and 30mm/s is the most common slower speed I have seen used by others. For weird filaments like Ninjaflex, Woodfil, etc. the optimal speeds and any slower speeds can/will be very different. Temperature too can affect printing speed.

    To me, 15mm/s for PLA seems *very* slow. I suspect you will get diminishing returns below 20mm/s. But that is just my impression. YMMV.

    Conversely, printing faster than 50mm/s can give good results too, depending on how well you have calibrated your printer and the part you are printing. (and the material too, of course).

    Anyway, hope this helps. Do some experimenting and see what happens. :)

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    • 4 weeks later...
    Posted · Do lower speeds make better prints?

    In my experience, if you print too fast, filament has too little time to melt (causing underextrusion), and the printer head's movements overshoot at corners (mechanical vibration), causing visible vertical banding ("ringing").

    If you print too slow, the filament has too much time to melt (causing stringing), and the print head stays too long on the same spot and will melt the rest of that area too, causing visible deformation. You often see this when printing very small items (e.g. fine text).

    So you need to find the optimum inbetween, for each material and each model.

    Normally I use 50mm/s for standard models, and 25mm/s for very fine models, always 0.1mm layer height, PLA.

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    Posted · Do lower speeds make better prints?

    OK you say "accurate and good prints". If you print stuff like figurines, masks, light sabres etc then accuracy does not really come into it - it is not going to be out by a factor that you would notice. I you are talking about dimensional accuracy in engineering, let's say a variation of 100 microns or indeed better, you do not really want to go above 30mm/s and 20mm/s will be better.

    For "good" it does depend on what you are printing. Take a house, which is basically a box with holes in and let us say it fills the entire print bed and is a scale of 1:100 or bigger (ie 1:50). As a general statement you will get better quality (i.e., it will look better) by printing .100 layers and fast rather than .300 layers and slow; but with any answer to your question there will always be exceptions - you might have intricate window detail that requires a slower speed, in which case I would print the windows separately and glue them in.

    But yes, as already stated, up to a point printing slower will make things look better - you do not have to look too closely at something printed at 60mm/s and 30mm/s to see that slower is normally better.

    I have never tried below 20mm/s, it just costs our customers too much to go that slow - give it a try and see :)- and make sure those fans are turbo charged.

    Remember it is not the size that affects this, it is the geometry/level of detail involved and the quality you want. I doubt there is much point in printing at 15mm/s unless your layer resolution is around .050 or lower - and if you do that with an A4 sized house I guess you in the realms of 160 hours print time :)

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    Posted · Do lower speeds make better prints?

    Hmn I have only ever used 20mm/s. I think with a level bed and the right nozzle to bed distance one would be OK, i.e. in three years I have not had a problem, Maybe the problem resulted from non-accurate setup? I used 20 because everything I read at the time said 20! No idea what the implications are if one goes faster, good or bad except I always understood that slower gave one better adhesion of 1st layer

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