yellowshark 153
Hi Tom, lots of great points Nicolinux. I will just add that this technology is not plug and play and if you want to get consistently great prints then you have to put effort in. It is a learning process with highs and lows. Take the time to try various combinations of the major parameters noted above. If you can afford it, buy decent filament. If you are in Europe, Colourfabb and Faberdashery supply good quality filament (there will be others).
One thing I had never considered before I started was how do you orient your model for getting the best printing results? At the simple end, if you are going to print a cylinder, do you lay it flat or print it vertically? There are pros and cons. Do you print it as one piece or several pieces then glued together.
If you do your own design then design for the way the printer works. Eg. if you build a house, how thick do you design your house walls? The printer has a 0.4mm nozzles so make your house wall thickness a multiple of 0.4mm and select the number of walls/perimeters needed. If you are struggling to get clean right angled corners, try designing with chamfers.
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Nicolinux 288
Hi Tom,
there are many ways to improve a print but in my opinon it boils down to these four points:
[*]Speed
[*]Temperature
[*]Layer height
The key combination is between layer height, speed and temperature. Sadly there are very few common rules to follow because every model is different. But that's the beauty of a rapid prototyping machine. Before you commit to a 15hr print, you could scale it down in Cura and print it in one hour or less to test for potential problems. Another thing to take care is the volume of filament you are asking the extruder to push through the hot-end and the nozzle. The Ultimaker Original and Ultimaker 2 have a nozzle with a 0.4mm diameter. In combination with layer height and speed you'd get this simple formula:
For example: 0.4 x 0.2 x 150 = 12mm^3/s filament.
There are certain upper limits of what the printer is capable of. As a rule of thumb (I hope others will correct me if I am wrong), when you want to print something with a high visual quailty - print at 20-30mm/s with 0.1 layer height and 220° temperature (for PLA).
Also I suggest to enable the "full settings" in Cura and also open the expert settings. Usually one big question (depending on the object you are printing) is if you print with or without retraction and cooling enabled. Cooling will be helpful for small and thin features of an object where the hot nozzle would move often above the same part of the object thus not giving the plastic enough time to cool and harden a bit. Retraction is very helpful for bowden type printers where the stepper that moves the filament is not attached to the head. This allows for fast movement of the head at the cost of oozing plastic when the head travels to a new part of the object. Retraction is used to counter oozing and is often one of the factors that make a print look awful or briliant.
There are many more future of Cura to look at and overall things you'll learn from experience. I don't think it is possible to sum all of them up here.
Interestingly, that was my first and biggest gripe with 3D printing when I started. How do you know which combinations produce great prints? My idea was to create a kind of a cheat sheed for 3d printing (geared towards the Ultimaker) to help people understand basic concepts. I am not very far with this project due to lack of time, but it is still on my agenda and I am actively collecting random bits of useful information from the forums and elsewhere.
So in the end I suggest you print lots of objects. If you print at 0.2 layer height and without infill they'll finish pretty quickly. Also make sure in Cura always activate "Layers" view mode (buttom top right) and move the dial (lower right) up and down to get a preview of every layer. There you can spot many problems before printing (like top covers that are too large to be printed without infill).
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