Printing in my basement

[LePaul 316]

I have moved my Ultimaker (Classic) down to my basement so that it will not be bothered by my cats or the dust generated by the litter box nearby.

Its pretty chilly down there. I would guess 50F

I printed a piece for my R2-D2, the grasper claw and I had the layers set to 0.1 and was moving along at a speed of 40, and a temperature of 215C

GR5 suggested reading the blog post about MeshMixer so I tried that out. That's where the supports came from.

Anyways, overall the print looks OK but I am curious if I should go hotter on the temperature and slower on the print speed to get a better result

I know I need some better supports, I could see the part moving a bit as it got taller (slower will help too)

Would love to hear some feedback on the print quality and anything I should do to improve all printing in a room that is cooler than usual room temperature.

Thanks!

 

[blackomega 2]

I have personally found that 230C is a good temperature and gives a noticeable improvement in print quality compared to 220C. As for the speed, 40 (I assume 40 mm/s) is pretty slow already but I find that a speed of 20 mm/s gives good results if you can stand waiting for them to complete. I've also started playing with the TweakAtZ plugin so I can alter the speed during a print (really slow for overhangs and layers that benefit from a slower print and faster for layers that can take it).

You might also want to try a layer size of 0.06 or smaller (not sure if the UM1 can go down to 0.02 like the UM2)?

 

[LePaul 316]

I set the speed to 30, temp to 230C and layer to 0.1

Here's how it looks printed horizontally this time

 

[illuminarti 18]

Looks like your retraction could be a little better, to get rid of some of that stringing on the moves.

Do you have the latest firmware from Cura 13.12 - or some other self-built firmware that fixes 'the retraction bug' (any firmware built from source or the robutfuzz builder, since April 2012, basically)?

What is your retraction speed and distance set to? And what is your travel speed?

 

[LePaul 316]

You know, I thought I had retraction on but when I look at Cura...I see the check box is blank. Ahhhh!

I bet it will print so much better next time.

Meshmixer is quite the interesting program, as well.

 

[illuminarti 18]

Ah, well, yeah, that would do it too :-)

 

[blackomega 2]

Looks like you'd be better printing this model vertically like you did before as there is a lot less overhang that way.

With the temp at 230C, speed 30 mm/s, retraction switched on and set to 5.5mm and the model printed vertically, how does it look now?

 

[gr5 2,094]

s, retraction switched on and set to 5.5mm

 

Actually I recommend 5.5 for UM2 and 4.5 retraction for UM1.

 

[yellowshark 153]

Do not forget that you need to achieve a minimum layer print time so that the previous layer is dry before the next layer is printed. It is difficult to judge the model size from a photograph, but looking at your model, whether you print it vertically or horizontally, I suspect you may suffer from this.

It can of course be controlled by overall print speed but you may need to achieve it by doubling up and printing two copies of the model concurrently, or using a simple hollow cylinder as he second model, which is at least as high (same number of layers or more) as your model.

Personally I aim for a minimum of 6 seconds and feel more comfortable with 8-10 seconds with the material I use.