Cura filament and time not close to actual

I’m new to any forum so please be patient with me. I’m a new TAZ6 user and don’t have but maybe 50 hours on my machine.

I am curious if anyone else has noticed or had the same experience I’ve had with the estimated time being off by hours for a 5 hour print or even the weight being off when using the Lulzbot version of Cura? I have only been using PLA and the Lulzbot Cura slicing software.

I don’t expect it to be exact, but I thought it would be close. Anyone else have the same experience and if so is there a fix?

I should have added that the filament weights have been off also. Sorry about leaving this off.

3d printer print times are almost always horribly off. It’s not just the Taz, it’s pretty much anything using a Marlin based firmware. Supposedly its fixed in later versions of marlin, but to get that on the Taz requires some codeing. For me, the estimate that the printer usually gives is about half the actual time it will take. I wish they had a “print time offset factor” variable you could add to correct it, but they don’t.

Thank you “piercet” for the information. I thought I may have been doing something wrong. I know I had a print it said would take 22 hours and it took closer to 30 hours. I’m still trying to learn about printing and not sure I will ever figure it out.

I just ran into a new issue. I’m printing Pro Series “Red” PLA from MatterHackers and when it goes through the leveling process it won’t get past the 2nd location touch off. I tried 3x with the same outcome. It keeps saying to clean the nozzle after it fails about 3x wiping it. I’m see the PLA is drooling at 160c and that is why it can’t finish auto-leveling. I haven’t contacted MatterHackers yet, but it shouldn’t be drooling at this low of heat. I was printing at 230c per their instructions and the last print failed and I was noticing burned looking strings at the top of the failed print. Thermocouple not reading actual temp? Material not to standards?

Again thanks for the help!!

PLA doesn’t print well at 230. 230 is ABS temperatures, you usually want PLA much, much colder than that. usually around 210 at the most. Different materials have different properties, and the color of the filament makes a difference as well due to the chemicals used (for example white filament prints around 5c colder possibly due to titanium dioxide used as the colorant. There are also many different formulations. PLA from one manufacturer may be 20-30% different than the PLA formula from another factory, even for identical colors. Differences in the amount of filler, binder, etc. make a huge difference when printing, and you will often find the cheaper filaments use much more filler than they should, because it is cheap.

Leaking at 160 does seem a bit low though. There are a couple things that can cause that. An air break in the tube between the heater block and the main hexagon barrel, trying to print with 1.75mm filament without adapting your hotend for that, a failed barrel cooling fan, or possibly a thermistor failure. Usually a thermistor will completely fail rather than partially fail though. Thermistors are cheap so you can swap one out for about a dollar. The resistance values you can read with a multimeter should also be somewhere in the forum if you want to check it.

It can be useful to keep a pair of pliers around to grab plastic ooze as it comes out to save your cleaning pad.

Another thing that can cause leveling issues is if one of the washers has come loose from the bed and is no longer conducting electricity, so that’s a good thing to check. The bed frame itself conducts part of the signal so they have to be in good working order for leveling to function properly.