UM3 Extruder calibration

[KickahaOta 14]

Pretty much every "beginner's guide to 3D printing" I look at emphasizes the importance of calibrating the extruders (making sure that "extrude 100mm" is actually pushing 100mm of filament and not 104 or 97), to avoid over/underextrusion. 

 

In contrast, the Ultimaker documentation for over/underextrustion doesn't even appear to mention extruder calibration as a possible solution. And changing the extruder steps setting requires going into developer mode and editing files, then repeating that every time there's a firmware upgrade.

 

I thought about phrasing this as a feature request -- for an extruder calibrator built into the firmware that prompts you through the measurement steps and then adjusts the steps-per-millimeter settings appropriately. But the absence of documentation suggests that this is a deliberate decision. So I'll just make it a question: What's Ultimaker's position on extruder calibration? Is there something about the Ultimaker design that makes it unnecessary, or that means that there are better ways of adjusting for possible overfeeding/underfeeding?

[nallath 1,124]

On 6/15/2018 at 7:29 PM, KickahaOta said:

So I'll just make it a question: What's Ultimaker's position on extruder calibration? Is there something about the Ultimaker design that makes it unnecessary, or that means that there are better ways of adjusting for possible overfeeding/underfeeding?

Any mechanical part will have tolerances so some things will vary from machine to machine. As far as I've seen (and i've printed with quite a few UM's) is that the variance is so small that adding a calibration is more likely to make it worse than better.

I think most of these guides are written with DIY machines or chinese knockofs in mind. As in those cases the tolerances (and thus the spread) are much greater, such an calibration makes total sense. Although UM doesn't have perfect quality assurance (But then again, what company does have it?), ours is pretty darn good.