That's quite a challenging layer height for a 0.4mm nozzle.
just a stab in the dark. the chamfer doesn't look like it's supported. what's your support overhang setting ?
Edited by PartySausage
1
This is a setting I've never played with so keen to learn. It's set to 59.0
I've been printing that layer height for other non-metal PLA okay on this printer for really nice pints. I need to print 2.8 for the first layer with 110% extra extrusion for the initial layer, however other than that it's been good.
Maybe it's just not going to happen with this filament.
@Bumbletoon you're misplacing the decimal point when talking about your layer heights - you mean 0.28mm and 0.12mm.
2.8mm would be pretty impressive though since the general rule for layer height is "no higher than the diameter of your nozzle" so 2.8mm would be 700% of what you're supposed to be able to get 😄
5 hours ago, Bumbletoon said:I also noticed that no matter what adhesion type is chosen, the remark line for it is created as
;TYPE:SKIRT
it prints the correct adhesion all the same.
Don't give that one a second thought. When you're trying to standardise type comments and such in gcode between different slicers and such, you don't want to have too many. SKIRT = any bed adhesion.
@PartySausage good spotting on the chamfer, the support overhang angle is set to 59° and support for them is (just barely) being created in the project file:
The problem is with a support X/Y distance of 0.8mm it's never going to get close enough to actually support it, especially as it's only a few layers tall (and the support Z distance is two layers).
5 hours ago, Bumbletoon said:I'm printing with Metal PLA (aluminium)
Important clarification: are we talking just a metallic look PLA, or PLA with actual bits of metal in it? Because the second one is a completely different ball game. If it's the latter if you could tell us what brand or (better yet) find a page on their website about it or something that would help a lot.
I also think that for a model this simple you really don't need to be using 0.12mm layers. 0.2mm layers are a lot easier for the printer and trust me, you won't notice the difference.
If you can print a regular PLA fine but this has problems, well then you know it's either something with the filament or something with your print settings for the filament. If you can't print regular PLA fine, you should make sure your bed is level and your Z offset is correct, and if they are, then we look at other things which can cause adhesion problems.
Important note: If you're using glue to help stuff stick down, then clean your bed between every print using isopropyl alcohol.
Quickly perusing through your settings I'd probably try a higher temperature, when I print shiny PLA I usually print it at about 215°, which is a bit higher than even what I use for the PLA+ I get (which I do at 210°) let alone regular PLA. If it actually has metal in it you're definitely going to want it hotter than you're doing it due to the higher melting point (or else it'll stay coarse and not go through the hot end and nozzle right). And I set the plate temperature to 65° for my first layer to aid adhesion.
1
@Bumbletoon I would suggest a support overhang no higher than 45 deg (chamfers are usually 45 deg so your higher support overhang setting would mean it's not supporting the chamfer) Don't be afraid to go lower if you're still getting problems like this. If I'm printing a filleted base I've sometimes gone down to 20 deg to give more support around the fillet especially when printing a thin section & if you're not already doing so maybe print the walls inside to outside.
I have an S1 Pro & have been using quite a bit of silk PLA recently @ 210-215 deg & 60 deg bed and a support xy distance of 0.6.
I've never used glue on my PEI plate though do give it a good wipe with isoprop every now & again
1
Thank you both for the replies! Hahah yes, sorry on the decimal points. Novice to 3D printing typing error.
It's PLA with metal in it, not a silk PLA. I've not had any issues printing silk.
I was printing at 210, however dropped it to 205 to stop the brim curling up.
I like the idea of printing inner walls first as cosmetically they're not going to be seen. It doesn't fix the problem, however it may get the project done.
I'm not sure I understand the chamfer issue. The sections that are shrinking are parallel to the supports below them. The 59 degree is the Cura default so I'll play around with that too.
Oddly enough, those example chamfer bits in the image you've added actually printed fine. Likely it didn't even use the supports and just printed above them not on them. The issue is with the parts such as the one I've added below where the part that's not bonding is flat to the mesh support built on top of the trees.
As you've loaded the file, it's later 282 that won't stick properly to 281.
In the last image below, I can see a gap between the support mesh and the print. Is that meant to be there or is that just how Cura displays it in preview? Is there a 'distance support is from print' setting I need to learn?
I'm using 0.12 mm layers because I was really trying to avoid stepping as much of it is angled, however I'll certainly try 0.2
Honestly, I think this may be a balancing act just to get this damn project printed and then never use this PLA again 🙂
It's a shame that it's the perfect colour and texture.
Thank you both again for taking the time. I'm learning a lot and it's really appreciated
I've never user filaments with added metals so can't help on the specifics & can only go by the imperfection seen in the pics compared to when I've had them in my prints
There's a couple of (& maybe some more) things at play I think. The print not being sufficiently supported, causing it to warp resulting in the imperfections in subsequent layers.
A reduction in the support XY distance may help things stick as well as a reduction in the support overhang angle to add a bit more surface are for the stick
The 3D Meta specs suggests that the cooling fan should be OFF although from your OP you're printing those layers at 100% cooling, which my be compounding the effect
PLA aluminum filament is melted by adding about 30% aluminum powder to polylactic acid. It can print products with metallic texture and metallic color, and is often used for printing crafts.
After special process adjustment, the printed model presents the surface effect of metal aluminum, can be polished, good gloss, corrosion resistance.
Specifications and colors:
Provide wire diameter: 1.75mm
Wire diameter tolerance: ±0.03mm.
Net weight: 1kg
Printing parameter settings:
Printing temperature: 190-210℃
Platform temperature: 50-60℃
Printing speed: 30-90mm/s
Cooling fan: OFF.
Recommended Applications:
Recommended for use in crafts, figures, ornaments, weapon models, etc.
Edit; The specs above could be bollox. The search I did pulled up a generic aluminium infused pla not the 3d meta, the 3d meta doesn't specify the cooling fan setting
Edited by PartySausage
1
Thank you! I'll try it with the fan off again. I did that to start with but it became a stringy mess. However after seeing this up close it really does look like A, it's being extruded too cool and B it's cooling before it bonds with the layer below it.
I'd not looked to heavily at layer adhesion as the brunt of layers stick great and it's a very solid print.
However I did wonder whether I should turn the fan off at later 282 for that layer and see how it goes.
I've changed a lot of settings throughout problems solving and it's probably time to reset to the start and try some of the suggestions above and see how it goes.
See edit above re. my fan speed c*ck up. The stringy mess may be because support z distance is too big it seems to be quite a gap in your pic above What's that set too?
1
1 hour ago, Bumbletoon said:It's PLA with metal in it, not a silk PLA.
Just a warning: while I don't know about Creality machines specifically, I do know that some machines don't support PLA with anything in it, at least as stock - for example UltiMaker printers will use an AA print core for straight PLA but have to use a CC core if it does have stuff in it (I think).
The S1 Pro should be able to handle it better than some older Creality printers, which used plastic extruder parts - those got chewed up really easily by stuff like metal fragments. Looking at Creality's website, it appears the S1 Pro has the same Sprite extruder my E3 V3 SE has, so while a lot of important parts (like the extruder gear) are metal, some of it (like the housing and the feed lever) are plastic, however this is before the hot end, so unless the filament is rough on the outside due to metal fragments, it should be alright. Props for already using a steel nozzle, I'd hate to think what something like this would do to brass.
8 hours ago, Bumbletoon said:The printer is in an enclosure with temp controlled at 24 degrees, plus or minus .5 degrees and no higher than 30% humidity.
PLA doesn't need an enclosure (straight PLA doesn't even need a heated build plate) and I wonder if using a temperature controlled one especially could be having an effect. I have my printer in a tent (though half of that is to keep dust off it because this place is an asthmatic's nightmare) but I don't control the temperature.
There is a bit of a thermal shock when something comes out of a toasty 210° nozzle and into regular air. PLA is ridiculously stable from a chemical perspective so doesn't have much of a reaction, just a little swelling to form the right lines. Metal however expands and contracts a lot more than the PLA due to heat so could be making your filament contract as soon as it comes out of the nozzle, making it not only geometrically inaccurate, but also significantly reducing the adhesive area, and making it set quicker, before it has time to adhere.
As @PartySausage pointed out (just because it's another brand doesn't mean it can't apply to this one), some metal PLA filaments specify that the fan should be kept off, which would almost certainly be to make to transition from hot to cool take longer. If you're pushing cool air around through the whole enclosure, then it's going to react to that instead of whatever ambient heat is generated by the printing process, as well as the hot air that results from being next to a piece of metal at over 200 degrees. So my suggestion would be enclosure yes, temperature control no.
Thank you for the edit, however it's worth a try anyway to see what happens.
I think you're right on the layers! I had a very close look at the layers and the support mesh is printed on layer 280 and the next layer above it is on layer 282! There is some printing on 281 but not the supports where the print it failing.
I've never changed the Cura default and have only found the setting now. 0.24
2 minutes ago, Bumbletoon said:I've never changed the Cura default and have only found the setting now. 0.24
Actually it's a calculated value. For a layer height of 0.16mm or higher, it's one layer height. For anything under that, it's two layers.
I'll confess, I'm very new to this and just set Cura to Super Quality and used a lot of the defaults until I needed to tweak something if there were printing issues. As you said, PLA is pretty forgiving and this metal PLA has needed me to step up.
I've always seen that gap between supports and the print in all printing I've done and did wonder about it.
At a basic, yes I need this in crayon, explanation. If I'm printing at 0.12 layer height, I can safely set the Support Z Distance to 0.12 as well or anything great that but not higher than what would be two layers high?
The reason I ask is, what I'm seeing when I set that distance to .12 is that still on layer 281 there's no printing for that support, however the support is already up where it needs to be for layer 282 to touch it from when it was printed during 280. There's still a little gap, however I'm presuming that's so we can get the print to come off the support.
The enclosure is because the printer is in a room that's often down to as low as 4 degrees C / 32F for ambient temp and the printer just running in the enclosure isn't enough to keep ambient tempt inside above 15-ish c. Or less. I'm using heat mats on a temp sensor to maintain a 24 degree temp. Your thoughts on blowing air about the enclosure are definitely valid and to keep in mind.
36 minutes ago, Bumbletoon said:At a basic, yes I need this in crayon, explainaion. If I'm printing at 0.12 layer height, I can safely set the Support Z Distance to 0.12 as well or anything just above that but not higher than what would be two layers high?
Anything too low (i.e. <.16mm by Cura's defaults) and the gap isn't really big enough to stop the support from adhering to the print. And it has to be a multiple of the layer height because... well, support is part of a layer. I think if you set it anywhere between multiples of the layer height it'll round to the nearest one.
If you're going to be printing .12mm layers but want to avoid as much gap as possible, set Support > Support X/Y Distance to something fairly low (like 1 line width, 0.4mm in your case) and make sure Support > Support Distance Priority is set to X/Y overrides Z.
36 minutes ago, Bumbletoon said:The enclosure is because the printer is in a room that's often down to as low as 4 degrees C / 32F for ambient temp and the printer just running in the enclosure isn't enough to keep ambient tempt inside above 15-ish c. Or less. I'm using heat mats on a temp sensor to maintain a 24 degree temp. Your thoughts on blowing air about the enclosure are definitely valid and to keep in mind.
Unfortunately in my part of the Down Underverse I don't regularly get temperatures that cold (except just before sunrise, in the middle of winter) so I don't have experience with quite that low, however at this time of year in the evenings it often goes to <10° and I can print regular PLA fine (even with the tent's flap open for a print where I'm changing filament every few minutes and I'm too lazy to zip it up - like right now!).
Heat mats are still going to generate a thermal current (cause, y'know, warm air rises) interrupting the natural hot-ness around the nozzle.
PLA (at least regular PLA) isn't particularly sensitive to temperature while you're printing it - you can print it on an unheated bed with no enclosure in a freezing cold or stinking hot room (Down Under summer) at high humidity (like, 100% high during the summer). Other materials like ABS are very sensitive to temperature changes and will warp with the slightest provocation (even if you just look at it funny) so keeping them in an enclosure is a must, but you don't necessarily have to heat it since you just want the temperature in the whole thing to be roughly equal. Oh, and you should use an enclosure because the fumes are poisonous. Don't use ABS unless you've got a very, very good reason to, folks.
As I said earlier, I'm guessing the metal inside the filament will give it a higher reaction to temperature change and you don't want that reaction to happen too quickly, hence letting it cool down at its own pace rather than using the fan in your printer or controlling the air temperature in your enclosure might help.
This is really bad. Even the first layer over support shouldn't be this under-extruded. The extrusions don't want to stick anywhere, they are completely round with no squish, and it isn't just one layer.
Have the E-steps been calibrated for this specific material? If the drive gear is biting into the material by a lot more or a lot less - then the Steps/mm could be way off.
Heeey! I'm in Adelaide! My printer is in a lined shed. Part of the enclosure was my wife was concerned about fire risk. Then once it was in an enclosure I was getting warping early on and thought it was to do with the enclosure getting up to 35+ in there. Thin parts were warping. Very likely it was my inexperience blaming the wrong thing. That's really good local advice!
This is what it looks like from the top and bottom. The flat surfaces have that non-bonded look, however the top is largely flat. Anywhere there's the non-bonded look it's been on a support.
"Have the E-steps been calibrated for this specific material? " - no, and it's not something I know how to do. I'll look that up and learn about that too. For the most part it's been printing brilliantly cosmetically on the outside, bar the bottoms. So I've not been too worried about it if I could just get the damn print to bond. I'll look into this.
Thank you and everyone for the assistance. There are all things I can try one at a time to experiment with outcomes.
It's the most difficult PLA I've printed with and I swear I'm going to conquer it!
I'm strongly thinking I'm printing too cool, cooling fan needs to be off or at maybe 50% (I'll experiment) and the support gap needs to be less. That all makes a lot of sense for what I'm seeing. I'll also look into how to calibrate E-steps for different materials.
Just now, Bumbletoon said:Heeey! I'm in Adelaide!
I'm sorry.
(Sydney)
20 minutes ago, GregValiant said:Have the E-steps been calibrated for this specific material? If the drive gear is biting into the material by a lot more or a lot less - then the Steps/mm could be way off.
Translation: The motors in your printer for movement and extrusion use "steps" - it's how they accurately move to the correct location (they're called stepper motors) so they always move a certain number of steps.
The E-steps are how far the extruder motor moves in a single step. It needs to be calibrated so that moving the E-steps per mm on the printer results in that number of steps feeding 1mm of filament into the printer.
There's probably tutorials for it on YouTube. Just search "calibrate E steps" or something.
8 minutes ago, Bumbletoon said:The flat surfaces have that non-bonded look, however the top is largely flat. Anywhere there's the non-bonded look it's been on a support.
I can still fairly easily see the individual lines - ideally I should have to break out my macro lens in order to do that:
That's 3.2cm square, so not a huge number of lines in total - but to the naked eye you have to get in really close or catch it in the right light to see that there are, in fact, lines.
QuoteI'm sorry.
Ya coulda been nice! However fair 😂
Aaaah okay. I'm familiar with stepper motors from robotics work. I thought you were talking about movement calibration not extrusion. I've checked and when I extrude 10 or 25 mm of material it matches that on a ruler.
I should still learn how to modify it in case of issues. Very worth learning.
37 minutes ago, Bumbletoon said:I've checked and when I extrude 10 or 25 mm of material it matches that on a ruler.
Did you check it with this metal PLA? As @GregValiant said, the extruder could be having a harder time grabbing it due to the metallic content.
(Or, since it's made by Creality, the extruder could just be in a bad mood)
I've checked it with this PLA yes, however I'll run it again. To answer a previous question it's their all metal sprite extruder, however I get your point
So far there's no external wall shrink at the bottom so fingers crossed it holds together at layer 282 where the main issue is! I also turned of enclosure temp regulation.
A little way on the trees are sprouting what seems to be over extrusion 'branches'. They all have them in the direction the nozzle exists the support. I imaging a little over extrusion bleb is collecting each time the nozzle moves off the supports. The main print has one too, however it's on the back so unless it fails the print, I'm just going to cross my fingers harder.
Honestly wish the forum allow for more than one answer to be flagged as the solution as I think it really was a joint effort
The little antenna are easy to remove and yes, it's from a spec from the nozzle being deposited when it moves to a print "island". Adding a bit of retraction distance can eliminate them, but now is not the time to experiment.
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Unfortunately I think it's going to have a similar problem again.
I've upped print temp from 205 to 215 and am printing internal walls first then outer with no part cooling. Supports now created as below settings. I'm still printing a layer height of 0.12 entirely because I forgot to change it to 0.2
So far the win has been all lines of filament seem to have stuck to the supports for the first layer of that floating, ring in the middle. I watched it print them; no loose strands. I also can't see any dramatic warping/curling upwards and yet there it is, those blebs of filament all around the edge, just for that one layer.
I rechecked e-step and re-ran the PID tuning for the hotend before this run.
[print file included]
Unfortunately a bit gutting on this one. It's all stuck to the supports properly so that's a win!On the down site, it's created this cyclic texture pattern. The base layers don't have it, however, however the walls above them do.
The only thing I've changed as far as the model print goes is increased temp from 205 to 215, removed all part cooling and printing inner walls to out. The inner walls have the same pattern so I don't think it's the latter.
Previously it was printing like the cylinder example below, but that had the shrinking, non bonding to supports issue.
Both were printed with Thin Walls enabled.
EXPERIMENTING METAL PARTS TEMPLATE 215 60-60 20ms-60ms 0 Cooling Thin Walls.3mf
Edited by Bumbletoon
MariMakes posted a topic in UltiMaker Cura,
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Base Layer Issue.3mfAdded the Cura file in a separate post as it's 100+mb
Edited by BumbletoonI also noticed that no matter what adhesion type is chosen, the remark line for it is created as
;TYPE:SKIRT
it prints the correct adhesion all the same.
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