General 3D Printing Thread


 
Yah, I certainly didn't mean to suggest you can just lower the temp and print with a clogged extruder. It's gonna require another disassembly/torching/cleaning and THEN do yourself a favor and start out at about 190C, maybe even 185. Perhaps he got the volcano pack with all the nozzles and he can just use a different size. I like the .6, it can kinda do thick and thin layers pretty well, I can print .2 or .5, no prob....
 
Yah, the extruder runs like mad and plastic comes flying out like WOW! A lot of stuff will print great with thick layers but there is always stuff that needs finer detail. So I backed down to the .6 nozzle so I can kinda do both until I get a second printer up and running, then I will run a super large nozzle on the volcano on the printer with the larger bed and run a smaller nozzle on the smaller printer for finer layer prints.
 
If you want to see a real beast check out the Cyclops! I'm still trying to figure out what they've got going on there... Must be PTFE all the way in on both filaments, diagonally, up to the nozzle. I know it uses a special nozzle so I think it maybe has a Y on the top to allow feeding two filaments, or two separate holes in the sides? IDK?? I do kinda like the idea of printing two colors through one extruder though. The chimera with two nozzles is kinda cool two, could print support material with one, or put two different size nozzles in it for fine and coarse. That surely add's another layer of complication for the slicer.
 
I downloaded the latest .deb for Linux and tried installing it but it's telling me it's meant for amd 64bit; I'm on i386 32bit. Any tips? Also, what can you guys recommend for modeling? Thanks!
 
I hear what you're saying about the PLA temperatures. I initially had tried running it at 180C and it wouldn't extrude at all. I had bumped the temp up a few times until I was printing at 205C but I was getting a stringy mess (not stringy on moves, actually not extruding enough filament so it would lay down strings). Once i had the pressure sensor on the extruder I could see that the pressure was around 4kg and the slippage was causing the the underextrusion. I kept bumping up the temp until the pressure equaled out and there weren't huge spikes when it tried to push filament and that's how I got to 220C. I thought for sure there was something wrong with the thermistor which is when I checked it with the bare thermocouple and it seems to be just about dead on.

The nozzle I just clogged was brand new, never had anything run through it ever, and it is a 0.8mm hole so it's not like it is a fine nozzle at all. I've never done a cold pull. I've printed close to 100lbs of filament over 2+ years and I'd never even heard of a cold pull until this week! Just goes to show how my J-head has been working for me. I'll order some nylon 618 and some of that solvent stuff and see if I can't get this thing cleaned out.

The filament is eSun 1.75mm black PLA (EDIT: I had said Gizmo Dorks but I just looked and was mistaken). I've never used any other PLA so I can't attest to its quality. I can say that my PLA is pretty "moist" now because when it was extruding it was definitely popping as it came out of the extruder so I am sure that's not helping.

Today I have strapped a HeaterMeter blower to the E3D heatsink. 6.7CFM and much much higher static pressure, this will easily push twice the airflow of the stock fan over that heatsink. I've got some 1.75mm ABS coming today too so I'm going to start with that. Thanks for all the discussion, guys. I feel like I can trust what you're saying over most the people who post to the reprap forums who don't know what the heck they're talking about.
 
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RalphTrimble said:
If you want to see a real beast check out the Cyclops! I'm still trying to figure out what they've got going on there... Must be PTFE all the way in on both filaments, diagonally, up to the nozzle. I know it uses a special nozzle so I think it maybe has a Y on the top to allow feeding two filaments, or two separate holes in the sides?
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E3D had a video from a maker event somewhere in Europe and they showed a Cyclops nozzle that had been milled in half. They had it printing, then quickly dropped it in something cold to freeze the filament where it was, then carefully milled it until they could see inside. The heater block is a T with the filament coming in from both sides and when you push filament from one side it just pushes filament out the extrusion hole while the other side just stays static.
 
eSun says 190-220F for extruding their filament with a first layer of 195C.... IDK WHY but it seems your hotend is running too high. I can't recall if you replied about changing the thermistor number in the firmware when you changed from the J-Head to the E3D? Seems like your temp readings are off or something....
Though I do have an E3D Volcano I stayed with the 3mm version because I figured it was gonna push more filament through so might as well run the thicker filament to make it easier to meet the demand. I guess you've got the 1.75mm version with the PTFE liner, I've got no experience with that model. Another reason I didn't go with the 1.75mm version is because PTFE gave me trouble on the J-head and I wanted to be done with it! How is the PTFE at this point, does the filament go through it easily? Maybe when the fan was out or not blowing enough the PTFE over heated and tightened up on you? That is what I kept going through with the J-head...
 
Bryan Mayland said:
I had a lot of problems with the print warping too at first. I eventually built a little enclosure around my printer to help stop it. The solution was to get the temperatures just right though. I print my ABS cases at 220C extruder, 97C bed and haven't had a problem in a while. Without the enclosure it had to be 105C. Interestingly enough I was printing some parts to make a new printer, which had thicker walls and more infill, and those would warp every time at 97C about 2-3 hours in. When I bumped the bed up to 105C (still in the enclosure) it printed perfectly every time.

Without the enclosure, it can take a good 20+ minutes for my printer to get to 105C, so that's close to the limit of what my heated bed can run. I'd suggest running the heated bed a little hotter if you can or maybe putting a box over the printer while it prints, creating the Schrodinger's Cat paradox of 3D print warping.
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Thanks, I will pass this on to him. still, for some reason the original stl file from Tom will not print right. The STL I imported to Creo prints with no issue except when it's imported the dimensions change just a bit and make some dimensions too tight for the HM.
 
I just threw my PLA on the volcano to get some numbers... I have gizmo dorks 3mm red PLA

I can extrude at 185C but can tell its not liquid enough to lay down well, at about 195C it's flowing nicely, some ooze, not bad. At 210C it has a lot of ooze, the kind the keeps growing and growing, twisting and turning from being over heated and steaming out the bubbles I guess. The temp is obviously too high at 210C.

I can extrude at 3mm/s continuously at 195C, I did 100mm continuous extrusion without jam, though about half way in it starts to slow down and extrude thicker, as if attempting to push too much plastic through the nozzle too fast, which I take to be the case. The extruder still pushes all the plastic through without slipping or jamming though. I can push about 30mm before I start to see the backup start at 195C. If you heat the plastic more it will flow easier/faster but then ooze becomes an issue, all sorts of problems result from ooze. So there is a balance to be struck there. Even at 210C I get the backup if I attempt to extrude a long continuous flow at 3mm/s which would seem to indicate it is more a physical limitation than a extrusion temperature issue. If I shoot burst of filament at 3mm/s less than say 30mm at a time the issue is a non-issue. Movements, retractions etc generally give the hotend those little breaks while printing, though not always, so faster printing maybe more of an issue with some objects more than others.

I also found that the itty bitty belted extruder is NOT a good match for the Volcano. Trying to extrude at these rates gets the smaller stepper really hot, hot enough to soften ABS and make the bracket bend and then the belt will loosen and slip. At least that is what happened to me. I tried to dial back the drive on the stepper but then it started missing steps.

I just did a test print with the hotend at 195C and the bed at 90C and it worked out well.
 
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Nevermind, just found the system requirements for the new version of Cura. I downloaded 15.04.2. I'd still like to see what people are using for modeling though. Sorry I know about off the current subject.
 
RalphTrimble said:
eSun says 190-220F for extruding their filament with a first layer of 195C.... IDK WHY but it seems your hotend is running too high. I can't recall if you replied about changing the thermistor number in the firmware when you changed from the J-Head to the E3D? Seems like your temp readings are off or something....
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Yeah I have the right thermistor set. I've confirmed the temperature is within 5C using a bare thermocouple and the FLIR thermal imager. It would not flow at all at 180C so I kept jacking it up. I know it is way hotter than it should need to be but it just does not work otherwise. This is my only spool PLA I've ever seen so maybe there's something amiss with it?

I switched over to ABS with the 0.6mm nozzle while I wait for the cleaning supplies to come from Amazon. Printed about 4 hours last night, no problems. It prints at 60mm/s 0.24mm layer 0.72 width at 220C just fine. The first solid layer Slic3r puts down over sparse infill, which should be 75mm/s 0.8mm width, the filament pressure went close to 5kg then started to strip, it can do this at 240C though. My extruder is a bowden with a full NEMA 17 motor on it that has no problem generating the torque needed but putting 5kg of force on a 1.75mm filament is asking quite a bit of the plastic.

I appreciate your PLA tests, I might buy a different brand/color and give it a try at some point but I'm happy just sticking with ABS for now.
 
J. Winn said:
I'd still like to see what people are using for modeling though. Sorry I know about off the current subject.
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I use OpenSCAD for everything just because it is so easy to modify your model no matter how complex it is. Oh this bit needs to be 1mm longer? DONE. Unlike modeling programs where you might have to rebuild the whole section just to add to it.

I've also used Autodesk Fusion 360 which is free for us non-commercial users. I've sort of gotten the hang of it but I am really slow at it. Speaking of really slow, it's an online-only product which sometimes has downtime. I've fired up the app before and oop nope sorry can't edit your file because the loading progress bar never completes.
 
So you can print ABS no problem at 220C? I was wondering how your temps run with ABS, that's right in the ballpark. I tried measuring my hotend temp with my infrared thermometer but I can't get it to register anything near the actual hotend temp shooting the surface of the heater block. IDK if it has to do with the infrared thermometer not sampling an area small enough to hit just the hotend, or maybe we can't expect the outer surface to read near what the temp on the inside of the hotend? I've never been able to get another temperature measurement to correlate with what the hotend thermistor is registering...
It's kinda funny though, after doing my experiment with PLA yesterday I kinda got it dialed in, printed a bunch of RD shims and prints were going so well that I kept printing PLA, got a whole bunch of shims printed out without issue. Then I changed the glass on my bed, didn't get the hotend height just right, was too close to the glass... When I started printing I noticed the filament going down was way squished so I aborted the print. What do you know, the PLA would not extrude any more, so it seems PLA is SUPER sensitive to the nozzle being clogged/blocked in any way. ABS would have powered through this and kept on extruding. After trying to push the PLA forward a bit I decided to retract instead. The PLA did retract out, I put some ABS in and heated to 230C (from 195C for PLA) and the ABS was able to push the PLA out of the hotened (thank god!). Apparently the PLA left some crap behind because the ABS was curling something awful coming out of the nozzle, something I've never seen before with the E3D. So I cranked the temp up to 250C and extruded a bunch of ABS and the hotend eventually came clean. This is another reason I don't like PLA, it does seem much easier to jam up the hotend....
 
This is so odd. I have had so few problems with PLA. Honestly, unless a fan dies or the hobbed bolt strips for some reason (erm, I forget to keep an eye on it and adjust) and leaves the PLA at temp for an extended period, it is flawless on my printers. No warping or splitting. It is great.

Brian, if you have the nozzle cleared and running ABS, you should have no problem running the PLA.

You can do cold pulls without the nylon. Just heat the hot end up and extrude filament if you are able to. Cool the hot end. I print PLA at 225 and cold pull around 120. You just have to play with the low temp until you pull the filament out all the way down to the orifice. When you get it right, you will have a little tit on the end of the filament and a complete cast of the interior of your hotend.
 
So I think I'm going to go with the 10" makerfarm. I feel like the 8" would probably be big enough for my needs but getting the 10" is more of an insurance policy just in case. My thought were I can print smaller on a bigger bed but it doesn't work the other way around. I didn't want the 12", it is just too big in my opinion, I don't know where the heck I would even put it. I am going to go with e3dv6 .4mm 1.75mm filament (I'm hoping I have better luck with it than Bryan is experiencing at the moment :( )and I am opting to get the aluminum bed upgrade as well.
 
J. Winn said:
So I think I'm going to go with the 10" makerfarm. I feel like the 8" would probably be big enough for my needs but getting the 10" is more of an insurance policy just in case. My thought were I can print smaller on a bigger bed but it doesn't work the other way around. I didn't want the 12", it is just too big in my opinion, I don't know where the heck I would even put it. I am going to go with e3dv6 .4mm 1.75mm filament (I'm hoping I have better luck with it than Bryan is experiencing at the moment :( )and I am opting to get the aluminum bed upgrade as well.
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I was looking for the biggest bed for the $ last year, I settled on the XYZ davinci at 8" cubed (almost). To be honest, I've printed probably 10kg of ABS & only filled the bed maybe 2x. with the trial & error nature of 3D printing, unless you have really simple structures, it works best for me to print 1pc at a time (or a few small ones). 1-3hrs per print. It sucks to have a 10-11hr print fail at 8hrs in because of something warping. cold drafts (even with an enclosure) can really wreak havoc.
 
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