Troubleshooting 3d Printing Problems

hi this is er shapiro of the dr vac's channel as we struggle through the second wave of covet worldwide and it does seem when we get together in a video conference we end up debating and arguing about i have found a wonderful way to bring joy satisfaction back into our lives make something when you print a 3d printed vase this is from the prusa repository printed in a wonderful silk style filament when you turn items on a lathe these are turned in various woods on a lathe when you design and print a custom bread knife as a gift when you make things you create things it generates joy it's a wonderful sense of satisfaction creating something or reproducing something and it's even more satisfying giving it as a gift so while the world around us seems to be blowing up we're going to spend some time learning about 3d printing now i've produced about a hundred and fifty videos maybe a hundred and ten hundred and fifteen of those about 3d printing over the last two years and i get the same questions over and over again people new to 3d printing seem to have a common set of problems i'm going to address those problems today but even if you're a 3d printing expert you should watch every minute of this video you should subscribe to the channel you should give it a thumbs up you should click on the bell so you'll hear about new videos because i'm going to cover a lot of material you might find one thing at one minute in the video that helps make it easier for you to successfully complete 3d prints so stay tuned and let's learn something together [Music] now i'm going to get started with a real basic there are many different types of build plates this happens to be a build plate that fits on my ender 5 and my prusa i3 mk3 it's a spring steel style of build plate that means that to get the build off you flex the plate and the build comes off here's a build plate from a ender printer that has the magnetic style of build plate they're not using these anymore in the new ender2 v2 the build plate on this little printer here was which is a mono price select mini is a fixed build plate there are many types of build plates but universally your goal is to have the print stick to the plate when you're printing and release when you're done now there are a lot of techniques for doing that they all start with one thing level your build plate yes i know a lot of the new printers have auto bed leveling systems still when you first take your printer out of the box if you assemble it or if it comes pre-assembled level the build plate now here's a picture of the knobs you would use to adjust the corners on an ender style 3d printer basically the procedure is the same there are a bunch of videos i will link some above on the drvax channel about leveling the print bed but the message i want to leave you with is even if you're using auto bed leveling first level your print bed now there's a limited number of 3d printers where you can't manually adjust the print bed the prusa i3 mk3 is an example in that case and this universally also applies make sure everything is tight that when you assembled it together you tightened everything really finger tight you don't want to over tighten components but you don't want them to be loose you want everything tight and rigid and square then in the case of the prusa printers there's a procedure built in the firmware that will check to see if the print bed is level and there's a new procedure in the newer firmware where you can manually adjust each corner which is the equivalent of leveling your print bed now if you don't have software built into your printer to level your print pad you still can use software to automatically move the printhead to each corner and i'll link a version of that software it's a g-code file and links to a video down below so number one problem that you see is things don't stick to the print bed number one solution is even if you're using abl auto bed leveling level your print bed the second solution is using a print bed adhesive is not cheating some people like to use regular glue sticks some people like to put blue masking tape on top of their print bed some people like to use windex i'm a big fan of a product called magigoo magikoo works for me consistently this is not inexpensive this little tube is about 19 bucks a tube like this will last me and i do a lot a fair amount of printing about six months maybe a little bit longer but i'll tell you you're printing something big and you get to here and it comes loose on your print bed that's a bad day where you've wasted hours and hours of time so invest in a print adhesive i've tried a bunch of them this one works best for me now the next problem that i see people having most often first if you're new to 3d printing you have to grasp the idea that you take a model that is a three-dimensional model that's saved in a format often called stl which is where the model is made up of individual triangles i'll show you a picture here on the screen but your 3d printer prints a layer at a time moves up prints another layer so you have to divide it into instructions about how to print a layer at a time so you're converting your stl file off into a file in gcode format not always there are other formats but g-code is the most commonly used the program as many of you know that you use to convert from a three-dimensional model to g-code is called a slicer most slicers though come with a built-in capability designed to make them easier to use and that is they have beginner or basic and intermediate and advanced modes the most common problem i hear about with slicers is that and you can see it in the picture here is someone's in the slicer it's set to basic mode they watch a video talking about a parameter they go to the drvex forum the discussion group forum.drvax.com they go into facebook and they hear somebody talking about something and they can't find it in their version of the slicer do they have the wrong version of the slicer is their slicer broken no most of the time it's just that they didn't turn on the advanced mode that makes all of the features visible problem number three people find 3d printers too slow a vase like this printed with a 4.4 millimeter nozzle in vase mode will still take three or four hours to print because it's large so the first thing people do is they find the speed setting on their slicer and they set the speed up or they go to the front panel of their printer and they crank the speed up and then their prints fail so in general high speed is bad for quality in 3d printing now depending on the quality you're looking for you might not care because what happens when you go faster well your printer takes less time on each layer maybe that layer doesn't cool completely your printer is vibrating more depending on the style of printer so you get layer shifts that's where the layers don't line up perfectly or you get a phenomena called ghosting we'll look at that in a moment so if you're having trouble the first thing you should try is slowing down your prints i'd recommend slowing them down to 30 or 40 millimeters per second depending on your slicer and then once you get things tuned in you can speed them up again now it's not just speed overall speed that impacts how long your print takes to print because a prusa direct extruder printer which is about the same size as an ender 3 printer in terms of print volume is significantly faster 30 40 50 faster depending on the print so what impacts that print speed let's look at this slide together the first thing is retraction to review for everyone when you're going along in printing and then you want to move the nozzle to another area and you're not extruding you're not pushing out filament during that move you don't want filament dropping from the nozzle so you retract the filament that reduces the pressure on the nozzle in order so it won't cause stringing across the layers now on a bowden style printer this is a bowden style printer because there is a tube between the extruder and the hot end on a bowden style printer there's a lot of play in the system this tube is flexible the filament is going over a long distance so typical retraction might be four to six millimeters pulling back a fair amount of filament that takes time every time you retract slows down your printer on a direct drive printer i have a monoprice ultimate 2 i have a quiddi xmart printer i have a prusa i3 mk3 on a direct drive printer where the filament goes right into the hot end and the extruder the mechanism that pushes the filament is right on top of the hot end there's less play so typical retraction might be a fraction of a millimeter to maybe 1.2 1.5 millimeters that takes less time so the more retractions in your print the slower it will print you could turn retraction off completely you'd get a lot of stringing but your prints will print faster so fine-tune retraction let's look back at the slide when you're producing a print and you have perhaps let's say multiple towers at various points on the print at times the nozzle sometimes will seem to clip an item well you can avoid that by turning on z-hop in your slicer that means before you move move the nozzle up move put it back down takes a lot of time you want to print faster print at slower speeds but with z-hop off let's look at the next item there are two parameters that are often hidden deep in the bowels of your slicer the first is minimum layer time so find out where minimum layer time is in your slicer now how do you find that well google's your friend on all this you can type into google cura minimum layer time prusa slicer minimum layer time simplify 3d minimum layer time and very often you're going to get the answer it's really easy if you have the minimum layer time too small you're on a layer that has very little printing you're going to move to the next layer very quickly that layer is not going to harden not going to cool before another layer is put on top and that will cause additional stringing it will also cause your layers to sometimes shift and you'll get failures so let's look at a video here and you'll see what happens when you're printing too fast where you have little points in the corner and you don't leave enough cooling time sometimes your print will actually warp up and the printhead will hit it you'll see that in this video next there's another sort of hidden feature in slicers called maximum segment size so your dividing up this print into moves on a layer you're not actually printing dots like an inkjet printer you're printing segments there's a parameter in cura is called maximum segment size that says how large those segments can be if you make it very small your printhead has to adjust more often that's going to slow down your printer it's also likely to cause bumps or sort of defects in your print so you can increase that it'll speed up your prints a little bit your prints will be less precise but they'll be smoother and finally let's look at two advanced parameters in 3d printers and in 3d printer firmware called acceleration and jerk the green line across the top is the speed we want to get to now we can't get to that speed instantaneously the speed of light isn't even instantaneous we have to sort of move up to that speed it's like you're stopped at a stop light in your car and you want to accelerate to 40 miles an hour doesn't happen instantaneously you can accelerate slowly or you can accelerate quickly the more quickly you accelerate the more you jerk around the passengers in your car the more quickly you accelerate on a 3d printer the more you jerk around your print causing defects or artifacts in your print so if you reduce the maximum acceleration you'll accelerate more slowly your prints might be more beautiful they'll take longer when you're going to come to a stop same thing in a car you hit the brake pedal gradually and you ease to a slop you don't slam on the brake pedal that's called jerk control now you'll see on this slide on this picture what happens if you have these set too high you'll end up with ghosting in your print so if you turn off your control acceleration control or you set them way too high you'll get this shadowy effect if you look at the y you'll see it looks like there's multiple y letters on this print those are called ghosts so if you see that in your print you want a lower acceleration lower jerk potentially just lower speed next what temperature should you print at you should print at the lowest temperature that will give you good layer adhesion what does that mean well once again 3d prints are actually printed in layers it doesn't matter what you're printing they're printed in layers you want the layers to stick together 3d prints are very strong in this horizontal direction because it's the strength of the filament but in the vertical direction where you have one layer on top of another they need to stick together if you print at too low of a temperature the layers won't stick together if you print it too low of a temperature you'll cause a second problem your extruder which is responsible for pushing the filament to the hot end won't be able to push it out the nozzle it won't be soft enough liquid enough if you hear clicking from your extruder it is likely that you're printing it too low of a temperature so you say why not print at a really high temperature well if you print at a really high temperature when you go to move your printhead on a travel mood where you're not extruding more filament is going to drip out of that nozzle that's going to cause stringing so if you have too much stringing you're probably printing it too high of a temperature what are other things that happen if you print at too high of a temperature well where your print sits on the print bed it might actually spread a little bit that's called an elephant foot that also can be caused by having your print bed temperature set too high how high should your print bed temperature be set just high enough so your print sticks it doesn't move around but no higher than that so it won't spread and create elephant feet so you need to fine tune your print temperature here's the gotcha it's probably a little different if you want to be perfect for every filament brand and sometimes even for colors within the same filament brand it is definitely different for different styles or chemical makeups of filament pla petg abs print at different temperatures now the next problem is primarily a problem with creality style printers they have an anomaly that many people have copied or design decision that many people have copied let's look at this picture together in an all metal hot end the bowden tube comes to the top of a metal tube that then goes the rest of the distance to the nozzle in a creality style printer the bowden tube has to go all the way down to the nozzle it's to be pushed all the way down to the nozzle on the anet et4 series same way on many creality look-alikes same way so on that style of printer very often if you're changing your bowden tube or you're adjusting it you're pulling it out to unjam a printer we'll talk about that in a minute if you don't push it all the way down you'll end up with a gap between the bottom of the bowden tube and the top of the nozzle that gap will fill with filament and cause gems so the most common problem i see people having with this style of creality alcoholic reality style hot end is that the bowdoin tube isn't pushed all the way down now to be proficient at tuning and maintaining and supporting your 3d printer you need to understand how the various components work that connect together the extruder to the hot end now i took this printer here as an example because it's just very easy to show everyone all of the parts this is a monoprice mini select printer it's very small fits on my desk this component once again is the extruder this component is the bowden tube this component is the hot end on each end of this tube you will see that there is a coupler when you press down on the top of the coupler it releases the lock so if i have this coupler on a bowden tube if i try to pull it off it won't come off unless i press down on that black ring when i go to pull it off so you have to understand how these components work together which will take us to the next section of this video where we'll talk about unjamming a jammed printer i've repositioned the printer with a camera on it so that i can show you close-ups of what i'm doing so the first thing we need to know is that sometimes a jam can be unclogged in a really simple way and it's really just caused by the fact that your extruder can't really put quite enough pressure on the nozzle so what i'm going to recommend you start with is turn on your printer and using the front panel of your printer set the temperature to about 10 degrees at most about 15 degrees higher than you would normally print your filament at you don't want to go 30 or 40 degrees higher because filaments can burn and that causes other issues so about 10 or 15 degrees generally this should be in the range on the label on your filament reel at the top end of that range so we're going to go here on this printer you go to something called preheat i'm going to set this to about 215 degrees and now we're going to let this heat up the idea is that making it a little hotter will make the filament a bit softer and then i'm going to manually by releasing the spring on the extruder manually push the filament through now some styles of extruders don't have the spring mechanism some of the higher end direct extruder printers so you may have to use the front panel to tell it to extrude filament this will work for a large range of desktop 3d printers okay we're up to temperature now so now i can push on this spring here and then push the filament in manually and if i want to push on the spring enough so the filament is free in there and i should be able to see some filament coming out of my nozzle now if i'm able to do that one trick to avoiding clogs in the future is before you're going to pull your filament out always push it in a little bit so push your filament in and if it's coming out then pull it right back so often you can unjam a nozzle just by heating it a little hotter pushing it manually through what if that doesn't work well then let me show you a couple other techniques now the next thing you might want to do is try to pull off the bowden tube on the hot end side so press down on the nozzle and see if you can pull out the bowden tube now if there was still filament in there you'd see the filament from here to here and then you can heat up the filament push it in a little and pull it out but if after you pull your filament out your nozzle still seems to be clogged because you're not getting good prints take a piece of filament cut it off straight on the end and then straighten it out now your bowden tube is out here so you have access directly to the coupler now take with your printer at temperature and manually push the filament through now you can put a lot of pressure here a lot more than an extruder could and so you should be able to see a nice thick bead the full width of your filament a little more than you would typically get with an extruder then pull it back out that is another technique that will often unclog a filament so you release the coupler from the bowden tube you take a piece of filament and you manually push it through now if that doesn't seem to clear it you can buy the a cleaning tool i bought this on amazon this is from reptor and these come with different size needles for different size nozzles this is for a 0.4 millimeter nozzle so you can put this in the top and actually push it through until you see it come out the bottom and go back and forth now you do need to do this with the nozzle at temperature now finally there will be times where you can't get the bowden tube out of the coupler in that case you'll actually have to take a spanner a wrench these come with most of the printers all the creativity appears as an example have one and you'll have to manually unscrew that coupler now i've never had to do that on this printer i do it on my ender printers all the time and the reason is that with the bowden tube going all the way down sometimes the coupler grips it a little too tight and you can't get the bowden tube out and then if you unscrew the coupler you can pull it all out together so you would take this wrench unscrew the coupler when you go to pull it out the nozzle will have to be hot so be very very careful well folks i hope this video has been helpful those are some of the most common problems i see in 3d printing if this was helpful to you subscribe to the channel click on the bell recommend this video to everyone you know and most importantly go to forum.drvax.com and discuss your 3d printing problems and solutions with hundreds of other viewers thanks again for watching let's continue to learn things together

Channel: Make With Tech (MakeWithTech)

Views: 38,949

Keywords: 3d printer, 3d printer in action, 3d printers, 3d printers 2018, 3d printing, 3d printing nerd, 3d printing videos, additive manufacturing, additive manufacturing 3d printing, cool 3d printing videos, how to 3d print, how to 3d print anything, what is 3d printing, what is 3d printing technology, bed leveling, 3d printer speed, 3d printers for beginners, 3d printer problems and how to fix them, how to use 3d printers for beginners, 3d printing for beginners, Make With Tech

Id: R5oeUtuTnjQ

Length: 27min 32sec (1652 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2020