view the rest of the comments
3DPrinting
3DPrinting is a place where makers of all skill levels and walks of life can learn about and discuss 3D printing and development of 3D printed parts and devices.
The r/functionalprint community is now located at: or !functionalprint@fedia.io
There are CAD communities available at: !cad@lemmy.world or !freecad@lemmy.ml
Rules
-
No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
-
Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.
-
No porn (NSFW prints are acceptable but must be marked NSFW)
-
No Ads / Spamming / Guerrilla Marketing
-
Do not create links to reddit
-
If you see an issue please flag it
-
No guns
-
No injury gore posts
If you need an easy way to host pictures, https://catbox.moe may be an option. Be ethical about what you post and donate if you are able or use this a lot. It is just an individual hosting content, not a company. The image embedding syntax for Lemmy is ![](URL)
Moderation policy: Light, mostly invisible
Why are you looking to upgrade? Are you chasing detail, speed, or something else?
Detail. I'm looking to achieve tighter tolerances with 3D printing, going for dimensional accuracy.
Dimensional accuracy doesn't necessarily mean detail. What are your expectations? You should be able to get fairly crisp and dimensionally accurate prints, but there's a ceiling. With FDM you're ultimately running what could be considered a CNC hot glue gun so absolute accuracy won't ever be as good as a resin or SLS printer.
Do your parts look good, but their dimensions are off? If yes, you probably need to scale your parts to accomodate for shrinkage. That's what the Voron team did and their parts fit together really nicely with non-printed parts when printed on a decently tuned printer. Their threaded test prints are a pretty good indication of how well dialed in your printer is.
Some of this also comes down to temp and material, so if you had the perfect interface and changed material you might need to iterate a few times. There are also the design quirks that you learn as you go, especially for things like small holes in parts often being smaller printed than designed. Print a hole gauge set, with a series of holes ranging in size, and use the one whose printed - not designed - dimensions are the one you want.
Sounds good. I'll definitely give those a try to further calibrate it.
I have the issue that the nozzle hits infill during travel motions and it probably has to do with minor overextrusion.
Sounds like your infill is curling up? Solid or sparse infill? If solid, it's likely over extrusion as you said. If sparse, my suspicion is temperature and/or cooling related.
Well. I'm not sure I fully understand it. The way I calibrated e steps was to tell it to extrude 100mm of filament and then measures how much filament was pushed through the nozzle. This resulted in a value of about 680 steps/mm.
This always overextrudes and setting it down to 640 steps/mm made it much better.
Setting flow rate in the slicer does not seem to have the same effect.
Lowering e-steps gave the result I wanted but with a lower value than was calibrated for.
Esteps and extrusion multiplier are related, but different, solutions to a similar problem. Changing one value by say 10% should be the same as changing the other by 10%.
Esteps is "how far does the extruder motor have to turn to extrude some length of filament". This lets your slicer know how much plastic volume should be extruded per step of your extruder motor
Flow rate is "crap, different filaments expand/contract at different rates and have different physical characteristics like viscosity".
This is why the extrusion multiplier setting is associated to your filament profile in PrusaSlicer and all its derivatives. I use a much lower value for ASA (around 0.88 if going slower and cooler) than PETG (0.95 ish) than PLA (1.0) than TPU (1.15 if memory serves).
I'll also tweak my extrusion multiplier depending on how I'm printing. For example, right now I have an ASA print going. The printer is laying down filament at 30 mm^3/s. To do this I'm printing a bit hotter than I normally would with this filament (245 vs 230). I'm also at 0.92 EM vs my usual 0.88.