Print Suddenly Way Too Small on Ender-3

[andymac7 0]

Hi everyone, and Happy New Year! 

 

This is my first post to the forum, so I'm happy to be here, and I'm sure will learn from you all!

 

I'm pretty much a 3D printing newbie, so consider yourself warned. Lol. However, I'm very experienced on the modelling side of things, working in Maya for over 12 yrs.

 

So, I'm running into a very frustrating problem. I've opened an .obj file in Cura, scaled it to 140mm long, and on my Creality Ender-3 it actually prints at about 28mm long. Which is, oddly, 1/5 of the size it should be! I've changed absolutely no settings in Cura that would affect scaling to my knowledge, and I've followed the exact same exporting procedure from Maya that I did for the previous print, which scaled properly. Being a graphic artist/designer and modeler I obviously would love to create my own objects for printing, but this issue has me at my wit's end. Here is the object I'm trying to print, as seen in Maya.

 

 

Here are the things I've tried thus far to no avail:

 

- Scale the object up or down first in Maya before exporting

- Convert it to .stl and then open in Cura

- Attempt to "trick" Cura by scaling everything up, (printer dimensions and all) by a factor of 5. This only caused the nozzle to move off of the bed!

 

If anyone at all could offer some help I would greatly appreciate it.

 

Thanks in advance,

-Andy

 

Edited January 2, 2019 by andymac7

[gr5 2,099]

In cura the print bed is shown with a checkerboard pattern.  These are 1cm by 1cm.  Check to see if this agrees with your part.  If it does and you slice it then it will have gcodes scaled to mm.

 

If you then print it and it's 5X too small there is something wrong with your printer - it's not taking gcodes scaled to mm.

 

For example:

G0 X100 Y100 E0

G0 X120 Y100 E2

 

The first command puts the print head at position 100,100 and then the second command moves 20mm to the right and extrudes 2mm of filament.  These values are all in mm.  Maybe your printer is in some other unit?  Maybe you have the steps/mm set up wrong on the printer.

 

 

[andymac7 0]

2 hours ago, gr5 said:

In cura the print bed is shown with a checkerboard pattern.  These are 1cm by 1cm.  Check to see if this agrees with your part.  If it does and you slice it then it will have gcodes scaled to mm.

 

If you then print it and it's 5X too small there is something wrong with your printer - it's not taking gcodes scaled to mm.

 

For example:

G0 X100 Y100 E0

G0 X120 Y100 E2

 

The first command puts the print head at position 100,100 and then the second command moves 20mm to the right and extrudes 2mm of filament.  These values are all in mm.  Maybe your printer is in some other unit?  Maybe you have the steps/mm set up wrong on the printer.

 

 

 

Thanks for the reply gr5,

 

As I mentioned, I'm a 3D brinting newb, so, I don't even have experience sending gcode commands yet. I will certainly look into this, as I do know installing Octoprint will allow me to send commands via usb. 

 

How would I go about finding the units setting on the Ender 3? I've explored all menus for exactly that and can't find it. i will revisit the documentation again to see if I've missed it somehow. 

 

Thanks again

[andymac7 0]

Also, do I need to buy an additional usb hub with a power supply?