Extreemly happy1

Hello All,

OK, I went through Mike’s excellent guide to great prints. Payed off big time!

I make my first part tonight SHHHH don’t tell Mike, I was supposed to print something simple many, Many, MANY times, but I couldn’t help myself.
OK, well this is pretty simple. I make a calculation cube in SolidWorks that is 1x1x1" with four walls (DUH) of 0.040", 0.060", 0.100", and 0.125". With a 0.625" hole in the center floor.
Well see for yourself the results:






:slight_smile:
I know it’s tempting to jump ahead. But at least you got off to a good start by reading my guides so if things do start to go astray, you’ll know how to proceed.

Nice looking part! I’m not familiar with those units " - what is that? (just kidding)

The hole is actually about 0.623", it’s just hard to hold the calipers with one hand and take pictures with the other.
It’s also perfectly round. I only mention that because of the “holes not round thread”.

So the only thing is that although I think this is a GREAT start, there are some issues with the side walls.
There was one pass (about 1/3 up) that did something weird. Also, the walls go nice and straight and then bump out just before the turn to go to the next wall. You can see it in the first picture. The bottom seems to “mushroom” a little as well.
I hope that makes sense.

Any thoughts?

Thanks. And a BIG thank you to Mike; I really felt confident doing this tonight having read (and reread) your two PDF’s.



Yeah, I know. I’m a designer so I do do a lot of metric stuff, but I will probably always revert back. Something about old dogs!

Just giving you a hard time! I use Empirical units on all of my CNC machines to fabricate my fly fishing reel kits and metric for all my 3D printers! When I design in Rhino I have to remember what machine I’m designing for so I can set the units correctly.

At this point, I think your slicing parameters are probably pretty good and you are having some extrusion path issues.

You didn’t say what filament this was (PLA, ABS or ?). And which printer and particularly, hot end.

But that “dashed line” defect you see in your part about 3/5 of the way up is due to filament starving. There are many contributors to this and I would attack them in this order:

  1. This one is subtle, but watch and make sure the filament can pull off the spool easily. If the spool does not turn freely, the extruder exerts must pull the filament and this can lead to filament starving.
  2. This one is a little tricky but after printing, leave the hot end at temp, release the extruder pressure bar and pull the unused filament up and out of the extruder. Look carefully at the last 4" or so. You are looking to see how much damage the extruder cog has done to the filament. PLA, in particular, is hard and the toothed gear will leave pretty significant burrs on the filament itself. These can catch any edge they slide past all the way through the hot end. If you can take a photo, that would be great. If these are very pronounced, decrease the spring tension on the extruder and check again after extruding some filament.
  3. Manually check the extrusion path to feel for snags. Raise the hot end to at least 50mm above the table. Then bring the hot end up to temp and release the pressure bar on the extruder. Grab the filament and push it through the filament guide at the top of the extruder and down into the hot end. Push with a consistent, relatively slow, stroke trying to mimic a normal extrusion rate. Feel for excess pressure (I know, subjective and requires experience but start to develop that now!) and especially feel for any snagging. Push about 100mm of the stock 3mm filament through, this will create a big pile of spaghetti but that’s what you want.
  4. If this was PLA, slow down the retract speed to 20mm/s and try again.
  5. Slow down the print speed significantly - as low as 10mm/s. What effect did this have on the print quality.
  6. I also recommend checking the path through the hot end and nozzle. Look for burrs at any entries/exits on drilled holes. It doesn’t hurt to chamfer these just a tiny bit with a drill bit twirled gently between fingers (DO NOT USE A DRILL!!!). Also make sure the inside path does not have any gouges or machining marks and make sure the nozzle opening is round and smooth.

Mike,

Thanks. I was using PLA on the TAZ 5 which has a hexagon hot end 0.35mm nozzle.

  1. I did notice that the PLA spool would “jump” every once in a while, so yeah, I would guess that that is a problem.
  2. I do have a section that I pulled off while hot when I was trying to solve the issues in my “initial TAZ 5 frustration” thread. I’ll shoot a quick picture of that for you later, I have a meeting to run out to. But I did think (wrongly it turned out) that I needed to increase the pressure on the extruder and I don’t remember backing it off, so it may be cutting too deep.
  3. Again, while going through last night’s issues, I did notice every time I had to pull the filament, trim, and reinsert that I felt some “catching” as the filament went in. So I will definitely look into that.
  4. OK, I was using your PLA for KISSlicer ini’s. See picture.
  5. OK, will do.
  6. Yeah, that was my thought last night (see #2). I’ll pull it apart and run a deburring bit on the opening.

Thanks again. I’ll be printing this again (many,Many, MANY times,LOL)
3-13-2015 8-47-12 AM.jpg

On the print speeds…

The screenshot you include shows the range of speeds configured for Fast to Precise prints (for the TAZZ in this case).
You actually set the print speed with the slider in the lower right corner of the window:
Screen Shot 2015-03-13 at 8.59.35 AM.png
Above the slider it shows the actual print speeds for loops, solid and sparse infill in mm/s. That’s your print speed. These are also put into the header in the gcode file so you’ll be able to retrieve them later by looking at the file if needed.

Yeah, I had it “set” to 0 so 30,50,50.

I’ll try one at 10 and one at 20 and see what happens.

One sound I would hear very rarely, I tracked down. It sounds like a very loud click. Basically, on a few reels from Esun, I’ve seen that the reel’s inner hole has ~20mm of filament sticking out to the center of the reel. So each time the reel does a full cycle, it builds tension on that until it pushes past. The print goes fine (I’ve never seen it come close to stopping a print or anything like that). But clip the filament sticking out in the middle of the reel if there is any.

-Jeff

Jeff,

Yep, that’s exactly what it was. So yeah, done and the TAZmister is printing fine a dandy!

Great! And I nailed it as my #1 thing to check. That 3mm filament is some stiff stuff! I’ve not seen anything like that with 1.75mm but I have observed the momentary starving.

Yeah, mike, I still want to pull off the hexagon and check if there is some demurring I should do.
But I can’t stop printing; I’m like a kid in a candy store. Where was this back when I was a model maker?

Also, mike, Jeff,

I want to print some ABS next, any reason I shouldn’t just go with the #'s from the Lulzbot website?

Ya, that should work just fine with filament from us. With other filament, I can’t make any promises, but if it is good, you shouldn’t have trouble.

-Jeff