Colorfabb XT, messy infill, shaking bed

[ataraxis 51]

Hi there!

I am currently trying to print a bit with Colorfabb XT.

Everything is good as long as the infill is solid, if it isn't it looks like the following:

 

 

What does this cause? Any ideas?

 

The problem *seems to be* that somehow the material does prefer to stick to the nozzle instead of to the other layers... even though the general adhesion is like perfect once cooled down.

 

The messy infill results in uneven layers and in a shacking bed as the hotend moves.

 

I would appreciate any help, thanks!

 

 

 

 

Edited May 10, 2018 by ataraxis

[ataraxis 51]

After some headache it seems like I might have solved this issue partly

For anybody else suffering from the same problems:

 

The first problem is/was that the temperature was most probably too low

 

1. I had to increase the temperature to 260°C to make the infill solid at 0.2mm @ 50mm/s. That's at the upper end of what Colorfabb recommends and may be also a bit high for the stock teflon couplers (I have installed a full-metal hotend (E3Dv6) on my machine)

 

The second problem was that the hotend (E3Dv6) oozes a bit more in combination with _XT that I am used to. Especially while it travels diagonally to the next layer. Combing does prevent any retraction while traveling over infills, therefore I now...

 

1. travel at 200mm/s
2. and - since there is no "retract on combing" in Cura 3.3 - I disabled combing to retract even on travels over the infill. Unfortunately that's noisy as hell... I really hope they add that feature in 3.4 as announced (somewhere on Git).

 

 

I've read that increasing the distance from the nozzle to the bed also helps on the problems I had (take a look at the recommended rigid ink PETG print settings, 4.).

Edited May 15, 2018 by ataraxis

[ataraxis 51]

Unfortunately I still have some infill problems if you look really closely, the infill does not look like that:

 

but like that (red color just for indication):

 

 

Any ideas on that?

Edited May 15, 2018 by ataraxis

[ataraxis 51]

looks like I am not the only one, I found a lot of others who complain about the same issue printing PETG, e.g. here: https://shop.prusa3d.com/forum/others-archive--f66/petg-and-renticular-fill-t14618.html

 

changing from "grid" to "lines" improved the infill print quality extremely,
what also helped is to print even the outer walls at the same speed as the rest.

 

yeah - workarounds and hacks, but at least it works...

 

 

EDIT:

I finally switched to Simplify3D instead of Cura - there I use the honeycomb infill which does not intersect. Solved all my Colorfabb XT problems at once. Lovely software, expensive but worth it! Damn, I realy enjoy that extremely fast visualisation - my mobile computer isn't the fastest and CURA was always extremely slow.

Edited May 18, 2018 by ataraxis