1st Post - Understanding settings in 4.4.1

[Tessmacher 1]

Hi!

I'm about to pull the trigger on the purchase of an Ender 3 Pro. To that end, I have downloaded Cura v. 4.4.1 and am attempting to familiarize myself with it.

 

Problem is, all the tutorials and videos I've read and watched, all seem to be aimed at people who already know what they're doing! In other words, I'll see something that describes what I am wanting to know, but the details are so glossed over and the explanations so lacking, that only someone with reasonable experience would know what they're talking about. I've even tried to follow a few video tutorials in the program, but nobody really explains how the relationships work together, or even explains where to find the feature or setting to make any adjustment.

So, I'm going to try to ask a very specific question, in the hopes that I can get a response I can understand and follow.

I have a set of parts that are all roughly cylindrical, ranging in height from 88.92mm to 152.41mm. They all have variations in diameter through the height of them, as illustrated by the attachment that shows the largest of the parts.

It is my intention to print these with an 0.6 nozzle, and at " but I'd like to understand the settings better so that I don't end up with a print that takes two days and uses 130 meters of filament. The relationships between the settings are not very well explained in a manner that I can follow how they work, to wit, if I change the Layer Height setting, to what should the corresponding Line Width setting be altered so that it will print efficiently and properly? Likewise, the internal fill patterns and densities aren't explained well enough for me to find the right settings. I'm afraid I don't understand the technology well enough to be able to express myself adequately.
 

In any case, here is the image of the part, and I'll try to answer questions as best as I can. Thank you.

[gr5 2,167]

For a part like you show, where everything is symmetrical around a center, you can use quite a large nozzle size.  For example a 1mm nozzle would save you a lot of time printing and the outside walls would be just as good quality.

 

The most common nozzle hole diameter is 0.4mm (second most common is probably 0.5mm).  So upping to 0.6mm is smart but 1mm is even smarter.  or you may not like the look of the top and bottom of the part with such a large nozzle.

 

Line width should match nozzle hole diameter.  So 0.6mm line width (there are several line width parameters in Cura - I force them all to the same value).  You should then set the wall width to a multiple of the line width so if line width is 1.6 then wall width should be 1.2 or 1.8 for example.  Not 1.0 or 1.5.

 

The layer height should be no more than about 2/3 of the nozzle diameter.  I recommend no more than 1/2 of nozzle diameter.  You are going to have to decide how much you care about the look.  If you don't care about how it looks then go for thick layer heights as that saves lots of time.  For .6mm nozzle a 0.3mm layer height is nice and FAST.  As the layer's get thicker the quality goes down.  For functional parts you probably won't care.

 

You are just going to have to experiment and then come back to this forum and ask more questions.

 

I notice that there is a hole through your part.  That will print about 0.5mm small so add 0.5mm in CAD to the diameter of that (and any other) vertical holes.  This has to do with the properties of liquid plastic (kind of like mucus or snot where it sticks to itself) which acts like a rubber band while printing and it gets pulled inwards.  You might find that adding 0.5mm is slightly too much and you only need to add 0.4 or so. 

[Tessmacher 1]

Wow, really good explanation with examples I can follow. Except for one thing. There's no "hole" through it. It's a 4mm deep circular depression, for a magnet to be epoxied into. There's one on each end. It's "solid" all the way through.

Thank you for writing such an excellent response!

Edited February 20, 2020 by Tessmacher