Why 3D printers struggles to print perfect cylinders [and how to fix it]

after what it feels like printing out hundreds of different training tests i noticed this one major flaw in a lot of my prints in the beginning and basically i noticed the surface quality of these cylinders that i'm printing is very lackluster i see small little bumps on there that are hopping all over the place it's not just at the seam and it's very random sometimes there's even blobs so in this video if you guys are seeing this on any of your features i'm going to show you how to diagnose this and how to fix it and if you guys have ever printed a benchy look carefully at the smokestack because you might see it there i started this channel about two months ago when i first got my adventure for the goal this channel was to really help out beginners or those people who are facing issues while 3d printing on consumer grade machines a lot of these videos are targeted towards the adventure 4 but a lot of these concepts can also apply to other 3d printers like the ender 3 or any cubic mega when i was first starting out printing these training tests i was using this file shown on the screen right here i didn't think that the surface quality was amazing but i thought that maybe it was just like i was printing very fast and the quality couldn't have gotten any better but then i decided to switch over and actually print a solid post and that's when i noticed that there's something definitely wrong here so i decided to sit in front of my printer and watch what was happening the entire 14 minutes it's kind of like a kid watching his cookies rise in the oven but to some of you guys who are watching this and you just want a printer that works it's like watching paint dry so if you don't want to go through the trouble let me show you what i saw happening [Music] so as you can see in this clip the printhead was not moving very smoothly there's a lot of stuttering in the print and you're probably thinking like what's going on why is there stuttering and that was the exact same question i had i did notice that from time to time there was no stuttering but most often than not there's a lot of stuttering as it was printing the circle what's even more odd is the fact that the movement speed going from one post to the other would be the exact movement speed that i commanded at first and then another time it would be like half the speed the next thing that i tried was tried to check all the tensions in my belts and maybe one of them was completely loose because i did have that happen to me when i got the adventure for but all my belts looked good so that was not the issue the next thing that i tried was switching filament and i switched to three different types of pla in every single pla this problem happened so it's definitely not a filament issue the next thing that i tried was maybe these are all poor quality filaments and i need to dry them so i dried the flashlight filament for about 18 hours and the results were still the same it wasn't a drying issue then i also tried to slice with a different slicer so for your reference right now i'm using simplified 3d just because there's a lot more advanced options in there compared to flash print so i decided to slice with the original slicer flash print and then i printed the file out and to my surprise it was smooth as butter i mean the string wasn't great but it was smooth so the problem seems to be coming down to the slicer now the root cause the issue actually goes into the g-code no the g-code is not completely wrong but if you look at the number of steps that it takes to complete one of the circle rings it's twice as long on simplified 3d versus flashboards and then it clicked in my mind as an engineer just knowing what's going on in the g-code and how the firmware reads it it's the fact that the speed of the machine executing the code going into the buffer finishes quicker than the buffer can fill up so to explain in simpler terms imagine your 3d printer controller is made up of two different processes the first process is to take lines from the g-code file and change them into machine code and load them into a buffer and a buffer is essentially just like a cue with x number of slots in there so once the buffer is filled then the processor who's trying to take the lines from the g-code and put it into the buffer needs to wait until it's a free slot then you'll have a second processor which will take one command from the queue at the head of the queue and it will execute that command however if this second processor executes the commands faster and the first processor can read the g-code file and put a new command in the queue then the second processor will just sit there waiting and that's why we're seeing stuttering so basically the second processor is flying through all the commands on the queue because those commands are very short distances as you saw from the g-code file simplify 3d produced twice as many commands for the same circle path as flashprint did so essentially each line in the simplified 3dg code takes half the time to execute versus the flash print so how i solve this on simplify 3d it's actually not a foolproof solution but it worked for these post tests i just had to reduce the resolution of the mesh it doesn't work on the benchy though because when you reduce resolution of the benchy you get some weird lines on the benching simplified 3d is not smart enough to actually change the mesh size and keep the original shape let me reduce the mesh size and we'll print this thing again and i'll show you the difference between the two so here are the two prints that i did the one on the left side is the first one that i did and it's got a bunch of bumps and the surface does not look very even but on the right side you can see that this print is pretty much completely smooth now i've actually went a step further and tried to prove out what is the smallest step size you can do at certain speeds so i generated some custom g-code where i would move the extruder head back and forth and just to see at what speed can the buffer keep up i started around a feed rate of 3 000 millimeters per minute and dropped it all the way down to 2000 millimeters per minute and the step size that i used between each g code command was around 0.4 millimeters i also played around with a step size anywhere from 0.02 all the way to 1 millimeter at 0.02 you can see the results look like this and it's terrible [Music] now although simplify 3d does produce this artifact on these circular prints i still enjoy the slicer and i've found that if you lower the speed for all these sections then you can get a reasonable print now i've also gone over to cura and there is a setting to actually set a minimum distance traveled between two points and that setting has actually made my benchy smoke stack look perfect but the reason i haven't fully moved over to kira is that i use the exact same retraction settings on cura versus simplified 3d and the simplified 3d results were still better and here's a picture of the two i'm still experimenting with cure though and if i do figure out what the problem is in kira then i probably will switch over completely there's also other features that are missing in cura like being able to set the temperature at different heights i know there is a script that does that but the script hasn't been working very well but kira does have more advanced settings than supply 3d so it seems like each slicer has their own problems and their own strengths so i'll probably still use them both in tandem but for me flash print i probably won't use that from now on out i'll be flip-flopping between cura and simplify3d the only reason for flashprint is sending prints wirelessly i hope you guys learned something from this video and if you did please leave a thumbs up down below as it really helps on my channel i've got a couple other videos up on the screen if you're there i'll see you there if not that's a wrap [Music] you

Channel: Just Make It Daniel!

Views: 15,107

Keywords: 3d printer stuttering, 3d printer vibrating, why does my extruder stutter, shaking 3d printer, shaking print head, how to get rid of 3d printer shaking

Id: BJC7yj1GPHY

Length: 7min 44sec (464 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 18 2022