Need some advice after first prints on TAZ 5

[KFayal]

Hey folks. Just got my TAZ 5 yesterday after getting a refund on a MakerBonk. Anyway, I’m very pleased with my purchase because I can acutally SEE things that I can adjust and tinker with! But this is my first experience with any other material other than PLA.

After assembling the TAZ, I did my first print from CURA - the Rocktopus. It came out great at .3mm layer resolution. I decided next to print out a thing that I downloaded from Thingiverse and sliced with Slic3r. I set it up to be the default .3mm layer resolution, and I saved it to the SD Card and printed it untethered. I used HIPS which was also what I used to print out the Rocktopus with. HE Temp 240, Bed Temp 110. It came out with some gaps in it, as shown in the attached photo.

. Actually almost everything I tried to print untethered didn’t look very good. And it got worse when I tried to slice the items down to .05mm layer resolution. Is it because I have the .05mm nozzle? The temps I’m using? Also when printing out the Lincoln bust, I kept hearing tiny pops like there were air bubbles in the HIPS filament, but I didn’t experience any from the same spool I used to print the Rocktopus. Could it also be the fact my noob experience with Slic3r? Cura did all of the work for me when I printed out Rocktopus.

Looking for some tips and advice on my first day experience with TAZ. I’m very excited that I bought this printer… Wish I had gone with this a year ago when I got duped into getting that 5th Gen thing from Makerbot.

[piercet]

Check the diameter of your fillament and make sure that is set in Cura. It looks like you might be slightly underextruding at the moment. HIPS is actually a really difficult fillament to print with to begin with. White fillaments can tend to want slightly lower temperatures than darker colored ones, so you also might try dropping the nozzle temperature a little bit and see if that helps at all.

[KFayal]

piercet thanks for the reply. Instead of using Slic3r, I just loaded the .stl model into Cura, and since it had my TAZ 5 settings in there I just saved the GCode file directly from Cura and bammo, it came out beautiful. I think I’ll just stick to saving my GCode directly from Cura. I think what I didn’t have right in Slic3r was the feed rates, it was printing way to fast from Slic3r and it’s probably that I didn’t have the feed rates correct there. I’ll fiddle with Slic3r a little more but I really like Cura.