My Secret to Filament Tuning with Bambu Lab Printers

with all my recent videos with the tuning methods available for the X1 I was asked to do a video on my own personal end-to-end workflow so when I get a new filament what do I do to tune it so I'll first go over what it is that I do and then I'll do some explanations for those and I'll cover a few extra topics as well I'm Jacob with butter pockets and before we jump in let me tell you about our sponsor PCB way PCB way is more than just pcbs they offer 3D printing metal 3D printing CNC Machining and much much more so if you need something done for a project in a material you don't have they're a great way to get your parts made quickly and with great quality to meet your needs here's the order form for a 3D print and it's super simple upload your model and then you have a wide range of materials that you can choose from including metal different colors for each infill percent they can do tap threads they can do inserts and they can even do part assembly for you so check them out at my affiliate link below and you'll be able to get a five dollar free credit all right let's get back to the video in this video I specifically want to cover how I tune filament and create profiles in Orca slicer but in another video I will go over all the settings that are available in Orca slicer and bamboo Studio because there's a couple differences so for my workflow the first thing I want to cover isn't something you actually do but it's something that will help you get consistent results out of your printer and that's to limit the amount of brands of filament that you use when you stick to the same Brands you can reuse a lot of the tuning that you do within that brand and filament type and it definitely makes things easier for you if you can reuse anything all brands have a tolerance for their filaments and if you stay within that brand that tolerance is usually consistent with every role that they produce at least most good brands that is prusamin is probably the best example of this they even put a QR code on the side of every box of filament that takes you to the parameters for that spool and you can see the exact manufacturing tolerance for your given spool with that said prusamin is probably my favorite brand of filament to you use even on my X1 but I still use Atomic polymaker and some bamboo Labs filament for this video in particular I just got some brand new rolls of bamboo Labs filament so we're going to use one of those and I'm going to tune it for you guys now I can already hear some of the comments if you're using bamboo Labs filament on a bamboo lab printer just use the automatic calibration it's meant for this and it should turn out good and I'm sure if I did it would probably turn out great but I personally really like to tune my own filaments save them in a profile so I can reuse it over and over again I don't need to run the auto calibration and especially for multi-color prints or quick prints I can just send it with a filament profile that I've already saved and it just makes things easier but most of all I just like doing it I like tuning all these filaments and I like running through it to get to know my printer and the filament that I have better I also want to point out that if you have a p series you don't have Auto calibration anyway so don't think any of this is exclusive to the X1 and this is really what you should be doing on a p series anyway so with that let's get into the first actual tuning which is pressure Advance now I know that some people may think the first thing you should do is run a temp Tower but I personally don't run temp towers and I'll cover why I don't in the second part of this video the current way I go about this is to use the pressure Advanced pattern in Orca slicer which is Ellis's PA tool baked in I also want to make it abundantly clear that when you do pressure Advance or flow ratio Extrusion multiplier tuning in Orca slicer you cannot use the automatic flow calibration make sure that is off when you send the file to the printer this is a pla filament and I know that most plas are around 0.02 for pressure advance so I run it from 0.01 to 0.03 with 0.001 steps I picked the line with the sharpest Corner leaning towards a higher value I see that this one is the sharpest and I will take that number and I will put it into a filament profile in Orca slicer now with pressure Advance done the next thing I move on to is Extrusion multiplier with pressure Advance saved into this profile I use that profile and set the Extrusion multiplier to one and then choose em pass2 and orchest slicer I pick the patch where the top surface looks the best to me where gapping is gone but the lines don't overlap and cause ridges and then I use this formula and I put that number into the filament profile I already created and it turned out in this case Zero was actually the best so you just leave it at one and honestly that's it that is all that I do to tune filaments when I get them there's definitely more that can be done and these steps can even be repeated to get better results but that is personally all that I do I went ahead and ran some test prints with that profile we just created I ran this low poly cat Link in the description because it's very angular and it shows off cornering ability I think the corners look great and I would be very happy with this as a print I also ran this cutout of a print that I normally sell so I'm very used to what it should look like I think the top surfaces look great and the corners look good and overall I would be happy with this print as well for most normal prints these settings are going to work well I should also mention that for these two prints I turned off the aux fan set the chamber fan to zero and set the seam to rear and those are the only other settings that I changed but now we can get into how most of the tuning that I do is kind of reactionary I typically will run a print and try to react to any problems that it may have rather than try to tune for all of the problems it could have beforehand because for every print everything is different the speed is different the layer times are different the amount of Corners are different the amount of overhangs are different so I would rather react to the print itself rather than try to tune for it ahead of time so with that in mind why don't I Run temp Towers I've found that the temperatures and default profiles and what is provided by the manufacturer are usually pretty good by default the bamboo Labs pla profile uses 220c for the hot end and I've found that that's a pretty normal temperature for PLA and I actually run all of my pla filaments at 220c unless for a particular print it doesn't seem to work same thing with Asa and other filaments I run all my ASA at 260c and particularly for petg I will tend to run those a little bit hotter just because layer adhesion is so important with petg filaments well I went ahead and ran one just to see what I could tell from running one because I haven't run one in a long long time and here it is what I see here is that overhangs kind of here in the middle of the print all look about the same for all the different temperatures top surfaces all look about the same there's really no stringing because I dried this filament before the video but what I do see is down here on the left there's a bit of a cooling issue with this ledge and you can see at the bottom some of the corners are curled up with that said I don't know what this really tells me almost all the temperatures look fairly similar and I would rather run a print that is indicative of what I actually print rather than this specific test model because you could tune for this test model in particular but it might not transfer over to everything else that you would print I would rather just run all my pla at 220c and react if a print is messed up rather than run this for a whole bunch of filaments for pressure Advance an extrusion multiplier those are both very aesthetic type tunings you want to see what your print is doing which is particularly why I run the pattern method for PA and the patch method for em I can see exactly what those prints are doing and I can choose the one that looks the best to me for whatever I'm going to print for everything else retractions speed cooling layer time etc those are all things that I would tune after running a print and seeing if anything went wrong if I do a preliminary test print of something that I am designing mining I will see if anything went wrong and I will tune it from there maybe I can see up the layers of the print that things are a little inconsistent and I know that there's a cooling or a layer time issue and I can tune that maybe I see some stringing and I can tune the temperature or perhaps the retractions or maybe my top surface doesn't look that great and I know that for this print in particular I need to retune my Extrusion multiplier or if the corner doesn't look great or the seam doesn't look that great I can retune pressure Advance particularly with retractions out of all the thousands of hours I have on this printer I've actually never touched them once I think something that's important for all of this is proper filament storage as well I think storing your filament with desiccant and keeping the desiccant topped up in your AMS if you're using one of those is really important to keep your filament dry and to stop any inconsistencies in your print due to wet filament I have this filament dryer that I use I bought it on Amazon it's Rose well branded and I'll link it in the description and I use this to dry my filament as well as reach charge my desk again when it gets wet I have this desiccant that starts off as blue and as it gets wet the desiccant turns purple so you know it's wet and needs to be recharged I use these containers that I got off of printables and I'll put a link for these in the description as well and I filled these with that desiccant and I put them in all of my filament containers and I use the AMS compatible desiccant containers that I put in the front of all my ams's as well I also made sure to print these out of Asa so that way I can just take them directly out of the filament containers put them in my filament dryer and dry them with the desiccant inside already so I don't have to take them out or mess around with it because trust me I used to do that and I had to print a little funnel and everything and it's no fun just print them out of Asa I tend to watch my prints a lot as well especially if I'm doing any overhangs or I'm printing something new I will watch it so that way I can see if an error happens mid print and I can either stop the print or just react to it when the print is done what I showed you guys earlier this is actually a cut out of something that I sell with embedded magnets and I'll do a close-up so you can kind of see it here on the top surface you can see where those overhangs are I found that by watching this do the overhangs over the magnets I was able to see that I needed to embed the magnet a little further down into the print so I could get better overhangs and doing that in CAD fixed the issue it wasn't even something that I should tune but in reality it was a issue with my model so maybe that wasn't the answer that some people were expecting but that really is what I do after printing for some time starting on an Ender 3 Clone and moving up to Modern printers like a mark 4 or a bamboo Labs X1 things are a lot more consistent than they used to be you don't have to tune nearly as much especially because of the amount of effort these companies are putting into the printers themselves the default profiles in the slicer and the filament itself and after printing for a while you will start to build an intuition of what to do when something goes wrong whether you need to adjust your cooling your layer times your temperature of your filament Etc so let me know in the comments what you guys do in order to tune your printers I would love to hear if you guys think I'm doing something wrong or if there's something that you do that you think I should be doing leave a like if you learned something and remember you can tune all you want but subscribing keeps your prints buttery smooth I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Butter Pockets Prints

Views: 89,528

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Id: 5CVq6DycUOE

Length: 11min 29sec (689 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 21 2023