Some print mistakes and one good one

Well, printing out a great octopus as my first print spoiled me. The next few prints were pretty bad.
Here are a few and some lessons learned.

For some reason the nozzle diameter magically changed from 0.35 to 0.5 after the octopus and the iphone case I’ll show later. I think that contributed to these bad prints. I’m checking that now ever time. Also the infill every “x” layers doesn’t seem to stick. I set it to 2 and sometimes it changes back to 1 and sometimes it stays at 2.

Elephant. If the model says, “should print without supports” don’t assume that if you scale it up that will still be the case. :bulb:


But then printing it at normal size and adding supports anyway made it a real pain to remove the supports. no pic right now but much of the support material is still stuck to the underside of the model. And with black ABS it really shows where you break it off.

OlmicDio another support issue. In Slic3r where it says if set to zero(0) it will auto determine support needed. It lies. It put support EVERYWHERE. In this pic I was able to break most of it off but around the standing figure there is just no way. Set the support settings yourself.


Dragon Coin This was printed with the nozzle set to 0.5 instead of 0.35. Still don’t know how that happened. Also, I probably should have used 3 solid top layers instead of only 2.

Calibration Thing from Thingiverse. I printed this to see how it measured up and it’s terrible. yes I know about the ABS shrinking as it cools but this is not uniform and the 1mm hole was completely filled in. The bottom dimensions were off from the top in every case. Also, the holes weren’t round.
Calibration Print Annotated.jpg
iPhone 5 case that turned out pretty good. It fit the phone anyway. :slight_smile:

Right now I’m printing a model of an experimental jet. It has about 300 little supports under it (just over 8" long model) so not sure how this is going to turn out. :confused:

Also, the web site gcode.ws has been a real lifesaver. That’s how I found out the nozzle changed sizes. I look at every gcode now to see if anything is amiss.
Well, I better check on that plane. Pronterface thinks it’s a 5 hour print. I get the feeling it will be closer to 10 or 15. :cry:
Happy printing all.