3D print quality: 8 easy SLICING and TUNING tipps for PERFECT results with Prusa & Orca Slicer

I got myself some help for this one welcome back Factory owners as requested by aoka majority this video is about slicer tuning more specifically about how to get the highest quality possible because this is what most of you care about technically these are the same things you have to consider if you want to print fast since there are a few other factors that will diminish your print quality even with perfect slicer settings I'll need to briefly mention those as well all tips are shown in pra and Ora slicer but should work just as well with Cura and friends the options might be named differently though so buckle up for some serious knowledge and let's Dive Right In I just recently had my voron 0.2 degrad and printing quality from this to this it happened suddenly in the middle of a print and persisted luckily the Warren stealth burner is extremely maintenance friendly a quick disassembly revealed rather slippery extruder gears since I'm currently building another waron 0.2 with a few custom changes I had a similar gear on hand to compare it to while trying to scratch my fingernails with the teeth of the extruder gear the lack of grip was instantly noticeable the gears were cheap Chinese bontage clones so I went ahead and ordered a pair of genuine ones a friend recently had similar problems with his extruder and I suspect slippery gears as well a bit of wear always happens for cheap clones made of softer metal this happens faster with filled filaments like carbon fiber this can happen even quicker since they are usually abrasive in my case that was only half of the equation Extrusion was possible again but not as fast as before residue in the nozle accumulating over time from printing hot and fast made up the other half of the issue it was probably the reason why the gear started slipping in the first place long story short always make make sure your Extrusion system is in good shape don't hesitate to change the nozzle if you notice a degradation in quality it's totally fine to use the cheap ones I never noticed any difference in print quality not even with the Chinese CHT nozzle clones you get better results for less money by changing cheap nozzles regularly rather than using an expensive nozzle for longer a lot of few favor PG as a go-to material while it doesn't warp nearly as much as ABS does it makes set up with being hygroscopic it's already prone to stringing when dry and that tendency only increasing with moisture absorption wet filament also increases the likeliness of other print artifacts caused by water evaporating while melting this also makes Parts turn out weaker than those printed with dry filament for optimal results you should dry your filament thoroughly after unpacking even straight from its packaging it can already be moist since you never know for how long the manufacturer thought the spools before before wrapping drying in a home oven is generally not recommended since all materials can give her fumes of some kind and I wouldn't want to risk those getting into contact with the food I eat specialist filament dryers are readily available and rather cheap these days they usually also contain a roller which you can use to print directly from just make sure to always stay below the softening temperature while drying for my most hygroscopic materials namely nylon and polycarbonate I moded an Ikea 3 65 box to contain spool rollers and some silic purs using regular PTFE tubes and pneumatic couplers I can use it to print without ever opening it the filament has been in there for years and is still totally fine to print [Music] today in the last video we talked about modeling sinns and many of you complained about the lack of Step file availability but did you know that step files are not only helpful if you want to make changes to a model but can also be directly imported into the slicer at first I was excited and thought this could be a game changer for technical Parts but after closer examination it seems both ARA and pra slicer just convert the step file into vertices just like an STL file and as of making this video they even do a pretty poor job both reporting open edges in the model despite that the model and slicing results look good in Ora Brer Slice on the other hand has a complete meltdown showing covered hold and misses entire walls after slicing that already occured with the first model I tested and might very well just be a fluke for now I'm going to stick with a mesh export directly in Fusion 360 the mesh looked noticeably cleaner to me than the converted step file just because your printer might be able to move fast doesn't mean your hot end can keep up melting the plastic and your extruder can keep pushing without stripping the filament especially ptg has a low melt flow rate which basically means you can't go as fast as with other materials the worst case is under Extrusion or a skipping extruder the second worst case is pieces of unmelted plastic visible in your pot of course this also decreases partt strength PL does smell easily but it also needs a lot of cooling to not turn into a bloby mess the upside being that bloby mess is then pretty strong ABS on the other hand flows easily and doesn't need much cooling which is also the reason why I really like to print with it the slicer option max volumetric speed limits the printing speed to always stay below the given melting rate of your machine and material combination the rate cap is not one fixed point if you go faster you will get some under Extrusion meaning the extruder starts to slip a bit and can't push the amount of material requested anymore there are ways to test the flow rate out there but they usually involve a Precision scale if you have one at hand the channel CNC kitchen has a great video on that topic it involves letting the printer extrude small blops of filament at different speeds and checking the weight of the resulting blops taking a slowly extruded reference as 100% you can then calculate the percentage of underere Extrusion at certain speeds in case you can't do that test you can always try to reduce the max volumetric speed and see if things get better for those of you wanting to go fast this is the option you have to crank up given your printer still has hat room to move faster if your motion system doesn't get any faster you can Al increased the Extrusion width on inner perimeters and solid infill 0.65 mm is totally fine up to 1 mm as possible with some drawbacks in print quality even with a 0.4 mm nozzle just make sure your extruder and hot end can keep up with the increasing back pressure of the smaller nuzzle orifice while too much cooling usually results in weaker parts that still look great assuming they don't WM not enough cooling results in soggy prints with small layers being printed at regular speed that means the next layer is put on the top before the layer below has cooled down sufficiently to prevent that you can set the minimum cooling time a single layer has to take at that value the part cooling fan will be running at the given maximum value and the printer will be forced to slow down in Orca you also have to check the box slow printing down for better layer cooling otherwise it won't slow down in bruer slicer those options also exist but are labeled a bit less intuitively they labeled enable fan if layer print time is below and slow down if layer print time is below the lad automatically includes the slow down for better layer cooling option of Ora the maximum fan speed is set a few lines above those options on the other hand you have more granular settings for overhang cooling you can choose a specific fan speed for 25% increments from 0 to 100% overlap Ora only allows for one fan speed when crossing a set overhang threshold with no speed interpolation in between did you catch the subtle difference in wording here Brer slicer is talking about overlap which means a lower value defines more overhang and zero means unsupported Bridges Ora calls it overhang threshold which means a higher number refers to less overlap and the bridge is a 100% overhang so to be clear prusia calls the bridge a zero and Ora calls it a 100 it is generally advisable to have fans at full speed for Bridges and print slow for advanced technical materials you might need to reduce Bridge cooling a bit but it totally depends on the material choosen and the part you're printing so a bit of experimenting is still up to you retraction is used to prevent material from oozing out of the nozzle when the printer needs to travel from A to B it's the most important counter measure against stringing and Tiny blocks how much retraction is needed depends on the material and the distance from the extruder motor to your hot end especially for Bowen setups this value needs to be rather high up to a few millimeters to work properly direct extruders usually get away with 1 mm or less retracting alone doesn't magically stop the remaining molden material from oozing out though it just relieves the pressure you probably know what happens next the nozzle spins a fine string of material from one perameter to another to prevent that we need to get rid of the remaining plastic droplet the three Magic words we're looking for are wipe while retracting what this does is move the print head a few millimeters back to where it came from to wipe off the excess material unfortunately we can't tell the slicer for how far it should move this is entirely determined by the parameters retraction length and retraction speed the former sets how many millimeters the filament is moved back while the letter sets the speed at which the extruder motor moves a lower speed gives the lazle more time for pressure relief you can narrow down the values you need by printing some stringing Towers I personally would run a few tests by feeding G-Code manually to the printer and see how it behaves let me know in the comments if you like to learn a few NE tricks involving manually fat G-Code dialing the settings in will help you get rid of most of your stringing problems there's also a value for minimum travel after retraction to stop the printer from retracting in case of small distances if you happen to have strings and screw holes for example you might need to lower this value in case you end up with a rather high value of retraction it is possible that the hot end can't build up pressure fast enough after retracting and you end up with empty sections for demonstration purposes I set a ridiculously high retraction value of 10 mm in case you have the same issue but can't lower the retraction value the option D retraction extra length exists it orders the extruder to push more filament back into the nozzle than it initially retracted this is meant as a last resort and the manual States it's rarely needed this one is my absolute favorite and somewhat of an Insider tip satop is in most cases completely useless and increases stringing there are good reasons to use it and we'll talk about that in a second but for now bear with me material is always laid down below the nozzle and plastic usually shrinks when extruded that means in a well dialed in system there's always at least a very thin clearance below the nozzle assuming that your printer doesn't overe extrude which definitely does lead to small bumps the nozzle gets caught on what setup does though is pulling a fine string directly from the surface it just printed the twet then travels from A to B and pulls that string with it having zop disabled helps a lot in getting rid of the last bit of remaining material it also makes printing a bit faster since the Z axis usually moves pretty slow given your machine uses a lead screw and not belt driven axis for the test print I took the Pria default profile and only disabled zop nothing else the difference is quite significant and obvious to the eye of course there are reasons to leave it enabled and those need to be decided on a per print basis most significantly are delicate structures in danger of getting knocked over or broken off steep overhangs curling up is another example and let's not forget Parts warping off the print bed the options avoid Crossing perimeters and avoid Crossing called overhangs can reduce that risk a bit but are no guarantee the safest bet is to leave zop enabled and thus most default profites do that while stringing is annoying getting the nozzle caught on the print at full speed is usually catastrophic especially if your printer can't detect collisions you'll end up with shifted layers if you can't disable zop for the aforementioned reasons you still can mitigate the stinging a bit by enabling slope lifting which means the nozzle is moved like a ramp instead of a straight 90° upwards Ora slicer goes even further and implements lifting in a spiral motion pattern those measures help to reduce stringing at least a bit if you can't avoid setup altogether in case you're interested in going even deeper into the topic of slicing or even something completely different there's a link in the description where you can sign up for free and let me know no strings attached I'd like to do a survey in the future on what you're struggling with the most so I can tackle those specific topics you'll also get some additional tips and tricks by email exclusive to those helping me deliver the best content possible quick bonus tip you can remove stringing easier using a heat gun I use an adjustable variant for soldering but a fixed temperature model works just as well the key is only briefly skimming the model the strings will then turn into small blobs you can remove with a utility knife some people try to get rid of the so-called elephant foot meaning a wider Extrusion than model on the first layers by adding a fillet or chire directly to the model model this does reduce the effect of it but it's fixed into the model while the issue is actually totally printer specific for that the option elephant foot compensation exists it simply shrinks down the first layer by the set millimeter value since the elephant foot depends on how close the nozzle is to the print bed this is the only reliable way to mitigate it with every model on your specific machine the elephant foot on resin printers has a completely different cause which is not so obvious let me know if your resin type of guy lifting your models on supports because he can't get your first layer to work another thing some people find unpleasant although it personally never bothered me are seams Extrusion does need to start somewhere and that always means there's got to be an end as well wherever that happens a seam appears nowadays you have the option to paint on the position where those seams should be done to hide them somewhere less obvious but of course it's not always possible to hide the seam so Orca slicer comes with some additional methods to get rid of it the option seam Gap tries to reduce the bump you'll usually get at its position and is set to 10% Extrusion width by default the options wipe on loops and wipe before external Loops also helps to reduce the bump that occurs if the extruder just stops or starts Extrusion at a point without extra movements I hope you found the video helpful and if you want to see more you can subscribe over here and watch another one over there see you in the next one [Music] and then

Channel: Small Batch Factory

Views: 15,509

Keywords: 3d printing, diy, fusion 360, CAD, woodworking, metalworking, maker, makerspace, workshop

Id: LquNt_8wBOw

Length: 15min 36sec (936 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2024