First time posting along with a few question

I leveled the rods by turning the threaded rods by hand, nothing more. Then unplugged everything and started over. I'm printing the battery holder cap right now and everything "seems" fine but I won't know until it's done printing. I really don't know what I did to solve the problem outside of leveling the horizontal rods with the bed. Well see how the part turns out. Looks way to fast to me, so how do you figure out the proper speed setting and what does the software nomenclature call it in settings?



Thanks for the help so far,
-JW:

 

And the results. Any tweaking suggestions to look into are more than welcome.

 

Thats great! Glad to see its working! So it looks like you have a ton of stringing. What are your retraction settings/are they on? Also something that makes the outside quality look better is (I think) unchecking "external perimeters first" and also if MC allows it you should print the perimeters before infill! That just makes the ever all quality of the pice look nicer. Also your walls should be about 2-3 layers. Hope this helps and if you have any more questions let me know! If you need I can share settings.

 

1. Not sure about the perimeters and infill suggestion, I'll have to look to see if those settings exist, thanks.
2. Not sure what you mean about the walls being 2-3 layers, hey I'm new to this. <smile>

-JW:

 

I printed three CAPS and only one body. The body was printed with the following adjustments. I was trying to reduce the stringing but didn't know what direction to take to accomplish that. My first thoughts were slowing down the speed and reduce the heat. The default speed was 60 and I ended up dropping it to 45 and it still seems fast to me. I reduced the heat way down to 199c from the default of 210c too. I thought that was a LOT but still didn't seem to do a lot but did help some. I also un-Xed Generate Support Material (as it was on). I wasn't sure what "retraction" really is nor how to implement it (I need to do some reading to see what it does). Then I read you need to be printing to make the adjustments. I wasn't sure how much to reduce it either but didn't notice any difference in stringing. I did notice after the body was completely printed a rectangular area on the side (no where else) that is "thinner". I'm not sure if that happened when I was messing with the retraction slider but it was about that height when I was messing with it. Also, if you look at the attached image the red arrows show where it's "webbed" and this is a "thick area" too. Then there's a "ridge" (note the yellow) on this side only. Not sure how to explain it but pictures should help a lot.

 

Sorry! I meant the amount of perimeters (wall thickness)

 

As for the "ridge" you talk about. That is where the printer makes its layer change. These are hard/almost impossible to get rid of. Im not sure about the other yucky looking thing you talked about :/

 

200 degrees is a fine printing temperature and you can easily do 60mm/s. The retraction is when the extruder gear pulls the filament out instead of pushing it down to squirt out plastic. This releases the pressure in the nozzle so there is less stringing.

 

Guess that makes sense. So it must be pushing out PLA when it rises to the next elevation while staying in the exact Z direction, therefore depositing double the amount of PLA at that coordinate.

 

Actually it doesn't squeeze out enough most of the time but it can go both ways.

 

I take the bed out from behind the printer and spray it in a direction away from the printer. Put the bed on 95-105C and run the fan at 255 this dries the hair spray quickly.