The secret to 3D printing PETG [Adventurer 4]

hey guys welcome back to just make it daniel and today we're going to be talking about petg and how to get rid of blobbing this is one of the biggest issues i've had so far over the 50 or 60 test prints that i've done and i think i finally cracked it you can see over here i did this retraction tower which i designed they're about six millimeter posts and you can see there's absolutely no blobbing on there also no stringing at all so i'll tell you in this video how i got rid of all that with this one setting but first off let me take you through the story of all the different test prints that i did to get to the stage because if you don't know all the backstory then this one trick might not work for you [Music] so to start off when i bought my printer initially i wanted to print with different filaments not just pla so i bought a clear roll of petg just to try it out and this was from wrap wrap i'll have all the links of the different filaments that i bought and tried in the description down below so with this clear filament the first time i printed it i tried a temperature tower and i figured that this would allow me to figure out which temperatures worked the best and which ones didn't and when i printed out this temperature tower it looked like this on the screen and that is not a pleasing print at all although you can't really tell because it's clear there's a lot of blobbing on it the stringing the part was extremely brittle and the layer lines were crap basically the layer lines were separating especially in the part that's on the overhang side at some temperatures the layers didn't even adhere and the whole thing ended up becoming a huge mess so my first encounter with petg this was the worst filament i've ever printed with i then proceeded to print out another eight temperature towers to see if i could change some settings and none of that really worked it was still brittle the layers were still coming apart as well as the top wasn't very flat and sometimes the print completely failed and i came back to a nozzle just extruding filament into thin air the next thing i did was actually just observe what was happening on my printer i think this is kind of like watching paint dry except as an engineer it's a little bit fascinating because you can see what the printhead's doing and the results it's producing and you start to theorize why certain things are happening for example why is it sticking to the bed so well or why is there so much build up on the nozzle so i saw that there's a lot of build up on the nozzle and it was sticking to the bed too well and i figured maybe my bed leveling is a little bit off so i changed up my bed leveling and realized that yep things were changing actually and the reason i think is because the bed heating up to 80 degrees this caused some expansion in the material and when i was doing my bed leveling this is at room temperature so that's kind of a no-brainer there why didn't i think of this earlier and perhaps you've come across this problem as well so if you're seeing that petg is sticking too well to your bed then consider leveling your bed at 80 degrees or 90 degrees if you're too lazy to re-level your bed and you kind of want to just figure on the fly it's possible to do this as well you can go into the menu screen in your settings while your print is happening and change the z leveling so there's a bunch of different settings you can change mid print and z is one of them and if you want to increase or lift the printhead off the bed a bit more change that z number to a positive number if you want to bring the head lower change it to a negative number or a lower number so this ultimately fixed my part from adhering to the bed way too well on top of that it actually prevented the part from becoming so brittle i think possibly why i was becoming so brittle is because petg was being jammed into the bed and then the next layers were jamming on top of that and just way too much stress in the part i'm not too sure if you guys actually have a more scientific explanation i'd love to hear that down below why petg is brittle but at least that's the explanation i came up with for now so the next step i noticed was that my parts were still very blobby and i was like maybe i need to dry my filament so i went downstairs checked my oven and realized that it didn't go down to 65 degrees the lowest it went down to was about 76 and some people online have said that pgg will fuse if you go if you set your oven temperature to around 75 or 80 degrees so i didn't want to risk that so drying the filament was kind of off the table here but this filament was pretty much brand new so i was like why is a brand new roll of filament wet already and right now inside my house humidity is around 44 so i kind of left drying my filament as a very last resort the next thing that i did was order some different filaments so i ordered some polymaker filament some duramic filament i have some overture filament coming in as well as hatchbox which is supposed to be some of the best filament out there the filament that i received next was actually one called everyone or ery one air one i don't know what it's called anyways this filament arrived by amazon i popped it into my printer and decided to print away and hoping that the results would be different well that wasn't the case because the parts that came up with the black filament that was from everyone came up blobby as well at this point i was like could it be that both these filaments because they're relatively cheap on amazon they're both not dried properly maybe i just gotta wait for the other ones to come in so i waited for the other ones to come in and i tried ceramic it was terrible as well then i tried some white poly maker maybe the color made a difference and that didn't change it as well so at this point i was like it's definitely not the filament being dry or wet and while i was trying these different filaments i also tried different settings like temperature i changed it from 215 all the way up to 260. that didn't work i changed the extrusion ratio from 85 all the way to about 105 percent still got a lot of blobs and when i did too low in extrusion ratio then the layers ended up separating because there wasn't enough material being extruded i also changed the bed temperature from 70 all the way to 90. that just made the parts stick a little better to the bed i tried different print speeds i went from 40 millimeters per second all the way up to 60 millimeters per second i even tried 20 millimeters per second that didn't change a thing at all still a lot of blobbing and also i got a lot of stringing too i tried disabling zed hop that helped a little bit with stringing the reason why zed hop helped with stringing is the fact that the nozzle is on the part and if you enable z-hop it will lift up a little bit and there's going to be a bit of string and then it's going to pull that string over to the next part where it's going to print next but if you disable zed hop what happens is the extruder is on your part and when it is done extruding at that island it's going to wipe its nozzle actually along the part along the perimeter and then head over to the next island so this actually helps wipe the nozzle a little bit i tried to increase travel speed to 150 millimeters per second and thought that might help with bobbing to minimize the amount of time that the extruder is traveling from point a to point b and in that time there's always some back pressure that's still pushing some filament out and oozing other settings i change i increase my retraction distance from two millimeters all the way to 12 millimeters i increase the retraction speed anywhere from 20 millimeters per second all the way to 60 millimeters per second still the same results i tried no infill i tried 80 in fill that didn't change a thing i tried different perimeter overlaps like 10 or 30 and in the end when i was super fed up with petg last night i was like maybe let's try a different software i don't know where this idea occurred to me but in the past i've used simplify 3d and that software actually had a lot of different settings that aren't available on flashprint perhaps there's different things i could do like put custom code during layer changes like turning the fan on or pausing or something like that so i downloaded simplify 3d and started my journey with this new slicer in simplify 3d if you guys have downloaded it and tried it for the adventure 4. you'll know that you can't actually select that as a printer they don't have this printer profile yet so i was like great now i have to make my own printer profile so i attempted a few things did some hackery there and nothing really seemed right when i exported the g-code and dropped it into flashprint it showed me two of the exact same model one of them was actually off the print bed and the other one was on the print bed and both were in red so i thought there was some major error that's happening here and i tried to actually dig into the g-code change the g-code reload it back in and this is changing it manually through text editor so i reloaded it back in and still the same thing happened there were two prints then i decided to port over the start code from a flashpin file into the simplified 3d g-code file and then there was only one print there however it was still offset off the bed so i was like this is really annoying how do i change this and then i realized that there are some flash forged printers that are supported on simplify 3d why don't i just create a printer based off of one of those printers and just change a few settings so that would look like the adventure for the type of g-code that flashforge uses is probably universal and this is assumption on my part so then i went ahead and decided to take the adventure 3. luckily enough they have that on there i modified the print bed settings i set up a profile for petg and exported it through the slicer into g-code and dropped it into flash print in voila it worked like a charm if you're interested in having simplify 3d for your adventure 4 then let me know in the comments down below and i might make a video later in the future but now with simplify 3d setup i had some very basic settings that are pretty much mirrored from flashpin onto simplify3d and i decided to print this i had my finger over the power button just in case something went wrong because who knows using an unsupported slicer right now is a little bit risky and you could risk frying your motors or the board so if anything went wrong i would just flick the power switch luckily nothing went wrong and my first print came out like this and you know what's he's sitting there thinking how did he do that with just switching slicers well there's actually one key setting in simplify 3d that produce this result and that is the setting and the speeds so it's not actually one of the speed settings per se but it's actually a setting that says if a layer is less than 15 seconds or x number of seconds then you drop the speed for that layer to about 20 percent it's used so that every single layer has at least a minimum set amount of time for that layer to be printed and the next layer is not actually printed until that a lot of time is up and the purpose of this is to prevent the next layer to be printing on something like jello because the previous layer has not yet dried on top of that if the previous layer has not yet dried then it's possible that the printhead could be lifting up the previous layer as well and just having the print totally delaminate so it looks like dropping the print speed significantly not 40 millimeters per second down to 30 millimeters per second but like from 40 millimeters per second to about 5 millimeter per second is the trick so again i went back to flash print to see if this thesis proved out not quite i think there's some secret sauce in simplify 3d it is a lot better though if you can see this part over here there's a lot less blobbing and the part actually stayed together versus this initial part over here this one has a lot of blobs everywhere and it was also cracking as well so if you guys are having problems with the adventure 4 and pet g and you're using flash print drop your print speeds significantly i think that other settings in simplify 3d like coasting or wiping these are also two other very powerful settings that will help prevent the last bit of blobbing that i saw on flashprint unfortunately flashprint doesn't have that available but if i continue to test with petg and find the golden settings for it for the avenger 4 using flashprint i'll let you guys know but in the meantime simplify 3d is probably the slicer i'll be using going on from here on out it has a cost to it at about 149 usd however it seems to be well worth it if you want to print with petchee they also give you a two-week guarantee if you're not satisfied with it you can get a refund so if you really want to print patchy and you're seeing blopping try downloading simplify3d test it out for two weeks and honestly you can just return the software after that if it works or not it's up to you if you want to try it or not if you guys are considering getting the adventure 4 i know i said in the past there's a lot of issues with it but having a 3d printer buying it for about a thousand dollars it's relatively inexpensive when you compare it to the entire range of things so for a printer that is in this price range there's still going to be a lot of fiddling around that you need to do in order to tweak settings and get the best print quality i've got links in the description down below whether you're in canada or the us for purchasing this printer it would really help my channel out if you bought through those links i've also got links to the filaments that i used before so if you want to see the polymaker patchy that i use i've got that link down below and that's what i used to print this over here it was a pretty good printer i will be releasing more videos on pet g and how to master it with your adventure 4 or any other printer out there and what each setting does when you change it i am currently having some inconsistency in my layers on a benchy so that's the next thing i'm trying to figure out and i'll have that video on how i figure that out coming out as soon as i figure this out that was a lot of figures there anyways i'm kind of rambling on now if you guys want to check out a couple more videos on the adventure 4 i have them up on the screen here and with that said that's a wrap [Music]

Channel: Just Make It Daniel!

Views: 137,620

Keywords: How to print PETG, 3d printing petg, petg settings, petg slicer settings, adventurer 4 petg, flashforge petg, petg blobbing, how to get rid of blobbing petg, how to get rid of stringing petg, petg temperature, petg cooling fan settings, petg retraction settings, petg speed settings, petg temperature tower, petg torture test

Id: vqwWs6xCnvQ

Length: 13min 45sec (825 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 25 2022