I just bought my mini (and first 3d printer ever) yesterday. I’ve printed the rocktopus on standard detail and I was quite pleased by the result. Attached the pic.
However, I’ve changed the material to PLA and tried to print a 4cm tall model of a woman on high detail. It turned out quite melty in certain parts (legs and head, with the torso being quite good quality), could this be that the layer don’t have enough time to cool?
Also I’m using a 3d Prima PLA filament, while I guess it’s not as good as eSun or Village plastics it should still be good enough?
While I have your attention, what’s the setting most people use for good quality prints, do people go down to 50 microns?
Because I’m an almost complete noob, any help is appreciated.
If you start with the Lulzbot Cura PLA profile for the Mini and tweak the extrusion temperature and filament diameter to match your filament, you should end up with very good results. You might want to get things dialed in on a medium quality profile before you attempt the higher quality settings. In general, the thinner the layers you try to print, the more dialed in the printer and slicing settings will need to be.
OK, I’ll try and fiddle around with the material settings. I find PLA to be more finnicky than HIPS so far. What sort of layer height do you recommend for a part this small? Do I have to mess about with the cooling or should that be sorted if I print out more than one model at the same time?
It sounds like extrusion temperature is you problem. It should be 190-220 for PLA. As for layer height, I normally go for .2 mm layer height and I get good quality from that, but I mostly do that thick to cut down on print time. Keep in mind, .05 mm height is going to have crazy good detail but will take 4x longer to print as .2 mm since it’s 1/4 the height. I’d also imagine such a thin layer height will have some issues with overhangs, but I have no experience going that thin so I could be wrong.
What temperature do you suggest at the top layers. For example here, I think because of the temp (was printing at 200 with pla) the loop was oozing a bit.
That is a difficult part to print. If you are already printing at a low temp for your filament, you may need a little more retraction to reduce the stringing. Some plastic strings more than others. Do you notice stringing on other prints?
There was stringing at the key chain hole but I cleaned it. When adding more retraction, does it affect the rest of the print if it’s set at a certain value? Is there a way to ammend the retraction value just for the last part of the print?
Some basic calibrations may make it so you don’t have to tweak a bunch of knobs. I got much improved print results for PLA and HIPS and can use all the default settings:
