I’ve made no secret of my printers vibration problem. Subtle ghosting, not easy to track down. But I still want good detail prints, so drop the layer height to 0.1 mm at 10 mm/s.
At this speed, the extruder exhibits quantization. The plastic comes out in spurts and under extrudes. The bent string part in the image is the skirt and should be straight. Apparently you can print too slow! I increased the speed to 20 mm/s and the raft prints fine.
Underextrusion caused by extruder quantization
With that issue fixed I print my Saturn V LES tower. Ignore the colour. I’m using a plastic I have lots of for test prints.As I’m fond of saying, for every solution there is a problem, and in this case it’s a bad case of stringing! This is new! A string test confirms it’s probably something in my settings and not inherent in the model.
Stringing in the LES tower confirmed with a stringing test
There are many ways to fix stringing. One is to drop the print temperature. I dropped it from 210 down to 195, but with my extrusion heating issues I didn’t dare drop it any more. I increased extrusion distance to 2.5 with no noticeable impact. I increased the retraction speed from 30 to 50 mm/s with some improvement. Finally I retracted 3.5 mm at 80 mm/s. The final result is some small wisps but that’s okay.
Stringing before and after adjustments
One variable I hadn’t addressed was the filament. This was a new brand for me, and although I’d done a couple of prints already, they weren’t models that would exhibit stringing. A test with my “standard” settings at 40 mm/s and 0.2 layer height show everything is fine. I’m still not sure if it’s the low speed or fine layer height (I suspect the latter), but that’s a topic for another day. For now I have settings that I can use to print, so I’m a happy maker!
Adjusted high detail, low speed string test compared to my normal speed and detail
This does represent a full day of effort. Don’t listen when people say 3D printing is easy. It’s easy for the experts who know all this stuff already, but for n00bs there’s a big learning curve. When I first started this would have set me back weeks! Even now it’s lost time when all I want to do is get something printed.