First print help.

Well it finally artived! YAY!

Unboxed without any dramas besides finding a little black round piece of plastic which i worked out goes undeer the bed to balance it. Went through the printer, no loose screws or switches or anything. The card reader was hanging down underneath, and one of the LED strips had come loose from its tape, but other than that, all good!

Slight issue with software until i seperately installed the serial/usb driver. Set the Z offset as indicated on the included bit of paper, and watched the getting started video to fire up a test print.

I cancelled a few times with adhesion issues. Tried hair spray first, didnt work, then tape, didnt work, then hairspray on tape, didnt work, then gluestick on tape, and success. Actually peeled the tape and went direct gluestick to glass.

Now the printer is obviously drawing a raft/support outline around the part first, but i'm not seeing nice straight lines. The extruded PLA has a small wave to it, about 2-3mm peak to peak. When i look close, there is a gap that looks suspiciously close to 1.25 mm between the tip of the extruder, and the bed. Which is where i'm guessing the wave is coming from as it curls out of the extruder before touching the glass.

I'm assuming the wave pattern isnt normal, and that gap shouldnt be there. The printer seems to auto level, but the gap between extruder and bed seems to be causing the PLA simply to not reach the bed inplaces resulting in a big ball of plastic string stuck to the extruder and heater block.

Help!

 

Pic:

 

Well, i removed the 1.25mm z offset from the settings that the included note says to add, and now its straight.
Must be that the auto levelling was zeroing it, but then adding the 1.25mm offset. Why was there even a note to say to add it??

 

Your offset was likely just too high. That wave pattern is due to the nozzle being too far from the bed. It will extrude some plastic, which is heavy and will go down to touch the bed, but then can provide a bit of support for the following filament. It gets heavy at a peak load and droops down to touch the bed again.

Continue using the offset, but perhaps lower it down some. If you're at 0.95, try 0.85.

The extruded filament looks good for the amount and temp. (It's nice and even without blobs)

 

Correct. How it works is when the nozzle touches the bed to when the switches activate there's a certain travel distance. Between .5mm to 1.25mm is about the largest I've seen.

How you determine this value is such:

Home all axis ensuring the Z axis is homed at the center of the bed.

With the nozzle still pressed on the build plate raise Z axis .1mm at a time. Keep track of how many steps it takes.

As soon as you can barely fit a piece of paper under the nozzle, remove .1mm from the number of steps you take and that's your 0 value and your z offset.

You'll need some Z offset or else it'll print pressed against the build plate.

Montravont wrote up a great tutorial on inputting these Z offset values: http://forums.robo3dprinter.com/index.php?threads/auto-leveling-z-offset-not-found.2590/#post-19930

 

I ended up setting the z offset back to 0mm and was able to get prints after that, but yes it was mighty close to the bed, and the base layer did seem a little "squashed" and bulged at corners of the test piece. Was fine after that though. I'll increment it slightly and repeat the test prints and see how it goes.

But, all up, had no real problems, and was able to successfully print within an hour or so of unboxing it, so definitely worth the wait!

 

Yeah you don't want the first layer squished. You'll get blockages and ugly layers. It's best to get that offset calibrated.

 

If you hear a clicking sound from where your filament feeds in to the extruder, stop the print and raise the extruder so the excess filament can flow through. That clicking sound means your clogging your nozzle and too much of that will result in pretty severe clogs & chewed up filament.

 

What causes this to happen?

This is from something i'm making, but last night i made a spool holder that mounts to the top of the R1, one piece was fine, another did the same as in the pic. That should be a solid flat surface. Its like its had trouble feeding filament through, and its just come in little bits for a few layers.
Layers lower down were fine.

Suggestions?

 

Clean your hobbed bolt, check your retraction setting and your print temp. You might need to reduce your retraction speed and might need to increase your print temp.

 

Cleaned the bolt, which ddi have some grease and shreds of filament on it, so could certainly account for slippage.

I'm using mattercontrol on its defaults for PLA. Extruder temp is 185c, and bed temp is 60c.
I am seeing some blobs when it retracts, but not sure how to tweak that.

 

Well, my first real successful print. Fan holder for the e3d extruder which i have ready to be installed.
Some small bed adhesion issues for the first layer, but getting better at that. The amount of glue from a gluestick seems to make a difference.

But still some blobbing, and pulled up layers when retracting. Need to work on that.

 

Oh what a difference an E3D V5 makes!
*hugs his printer*

I have a 0.25mm nozzle for the v5 as well as the stock 0.4mm one, do i have to go through the "heat to 300c" process every time i swap the nozzle?

I was thinking of ordering a V6, putting the 0.25mm on that, and just swap extruders when i want to do fine details.

 

Yeah though I usually just heat to like 270.

Eh if you already have the v5 just buy the v6 nozzle. That's the biggest improvement IMO.