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Love it! I would call myself an advanced and experienced 3D printer user, but you're never too old and good to learn something new. Thanks and keep doing this series!
The first problem also can be solved by enabling coasting in Cura. It stops filament feed a few mm before the perimeter end. So the hotend can relive pressure a bit. It helps a lot with runny filaments like PTEG.
Nice tip, didn't know about the coasting (I knew it was there, but never figured where it was helpful). Gotta check that out if I end up with this problem now!
Great video, the little bumps i always thought was caused by not enough retraction. Had the issue on an older printer but haven't seen it since but now i know if i come across it.
I enjoy helping other troubleshoot and watching these types of videos. Often it's something you've seen before and can quickly help someone, which is its own reward, but sometimes you get a fun puzzle to solve. It helps them, and it helps you grow your own knowledge. The more you learn about all these failure modes, the less frustrating 3D printing becomes, and you actually start enjoying the hobby rather than dreading the next problem. Nice video, Thomas!
Great video! I just got my first 3D printer this past Xmas and you answered all the small questions I was having about my printing. So happy to have a visual to see and compare with my prints. I've been struggling to find a good comparison of my defects so I can find a solution and this answered them all in a quick but very thorough manner! Thank you so so so much!
1st problem - can try enable "retract on layer change" to decrease pressure a bit. 3td problem - PETG does not like to be squished in general. Also, layer above it may fail to bind to first layer properly then and you may get tears in 2nd and other layers.
So you say there is more than to calibrate your E-Steps and level your bed? All kidding aside, very educational video. Really interesting how much you go into detail and spot mistakes that non-senpais would simply miss. It just shows the years of experience, knowledge and passion for the subject. Looking forward to the next videos!
Re: cleaning print surfaces I apparently have oily skin, I've flooded Prusa sheets with IPA before and still got adhesion issues. When I put on nitrile gloves, that went away. If that still doesn't work, I give it a quick swipe with acetone then clean it with IPA. Filleted surfaces facing down can turn into a dog's dinner when 3D printed, especially if the fillet goes all the way around the model (that can result in air printing). It might be worth cutting the model in half and printing the pieces with the fillets facing up, then gluing the pieces back together.
This is such a good video! Just hearing your thought process when diagnosing and solving problems helps so much because otherwise I might never think of some of these things on my own. I hope these videos become a regular thing!
I’m having a warping issue with a large flat lid for a electronics box project on my Prusa Mini+, I am on a support email thread with a guy from Prusa. So far very satisfied with my printer.
Tom, I've been tinkering with 3d printers almost as long as you but was stumped by a first layer issue for the past few weeks. After watching this video it turns out first layer extrusion multiplier was screwing up all of the layers as high as 10-15! Pretty cool that a relatively experienced hobbyist can still learn a thing or two from newbie-oriented content. Also, I was recently thinking about your foray into MPCNC-land and what a sour experience that was. Have you given the PrintNC a look? It looks like it might check all the boxes. Fully open source(well organized Fusion 360 parametric model free to download!), utilizes 3d printed parts for machine building, and has relatively little content already on youtube about it. The discord is also very active. Worth a look if you're thinking about new project content. Cheers!~
In response to the first problem with the blobs on the seems: make sure you print the inner perimeters before the outer. If you print the outer first your nozzle will ooze during the travel move to the beginning of the seem. With internal perimeters first the ooze wipe will be invisible and the outer perimeter will start with just moving over 1 perimeter thickness from where the previous perimeter ended so no time to ooze.
Thanks for giving me the inspiration to take the cover off my old heavy modded cr10s :) She now has all bearings degreased and refurbished, all pulleys checked and belts tightened. Went over all the frame screws just for fun, and im glad i did :) some1 was sloppy when assembling? hmm i wonder :P Juuuust finished leveling the bed, all i had was tpu,, but it worked fine ;) 0.1mm layer squares, all within 0.01mm tolerance. I think i got it level enough now;) THanks again man. Currently printing a can sleeve cooler thing for my coldsnacks. Cheers
The first problem looks like too high of a retraction length. If set too high, the nozzle can suck up a bubble of air inside and then get pushed out close to the start of the line/seam. I had noticed this issue when doing a pressure advance tuning tower. The bubble/zit was always on the side of the start of the seam. I turned down the retraction length from 2.0mm to 0.5mm and the zits completely disappeared. I have a Voron v0.1 with a Dragonfly hotend.
Great video! I really liked this format for sharing your vast experience with these little 3d print issues. I feel like I'm going to learn a lot going forward from these.
Excellent clip. Do more like this. These would be extremely useful to not just the n00bs. All of us struggle with "weird" printer issues from time to time.
Problem 2 is a good example of why I think the closed loop systems that measure the movement of the stepper motor is basically worhless. You need to measure the opposite pulley tot he motor so you know that something have actually moved instead of the motor that might move but everything else is standing still.
Hehe, this is part of the fun with 3d printing, solving problems that crop up all the time. I'm a bit stupid so I designed and built my own core-xy 3d printer from scratch after only having made 5 ish prints with the cr10 I started with. Tuning a 3d printer from scratch is a learning experience I tell you!
The Zips can also be reduced further by the new (experimental) Cura/PrusaSlicer setting "Pressurer Equalizer". If you set an appropriate value for the "slow down" portion of the function, the print time will increase slightly, as you basically "ramp down" to the lower speed for outer perimeters. But your slicer will have an easier time to calculate realistic pressure buildup in bowden extruders and thus get more consistent linear extrusions. That + the mentioned measures should pretty much eliminate the issue.
Great tips, thanks I currently have a printer that stops extruding after a random number of layers. I suspect that I have an extruder cable with an interment open.
Thanks for the great video Thomas. I found your video very informative. I've been printing for a few years now and still learning thanks to great content like this.
On my Prusa Mini, I have been having some minor issues with connecting multiple parts together. Instead of a flat edge between the two, the two parts have a slight curl away from each other, creating a noticeable gap. I am using painters tape to increase bed adhesion, could that be an issue?
Most of the problems I have encountered over the years can be described by saying the model of my printer: Lulzbot Mini V0 The joys of being an early adopter lol Ours was probably within the first few thousand of the lulzbot mini's produced, so z axis issues, bed levelling problems, bushings and belts wearing out from old age, mounts for the various bearings for the belts cracking, z offsets being off from the factory, the clamp for the extruder feed system often broke on the early ones they made it thicker later on, not to mention the electrical faults, good god the wiring in that thing was a rat's nest haha
The thing that gets me is trying to match the flaws I'm getting with examples online. Text searches often return spurious hits because I can't describe them specifically enough. Images in troubleshooting guides often differ enough that I'm not quite sure which one applies (if any). That's why I like test models designed to elicit specific problems. Starts to cross over into printer calibration from troubleshooting, and there might be too many models to expect someone to run but arranging them in a hierarchy if greater diagnosis is required might help.
Your flaws may not be from the slicer- they can be from mechanical issues with the printer and the firmware - things like E steps etc. Slicers of today are so much better than 5 yrs ago and most profiles work out of the box with no tweaks - cura and prusia are two i use and have found they work fine in most instances . I think a lot of people try to run before they can walk and end up so confused -try the pre configured profile first then work from that.
Not really since it happens when the printer moves from inner to outer wall. You would just end up with obvious zits in a vertical line and that gradient he mentioned
Very good video and analysis, as always. I'd even say some of the discussed issues, if not all, have their solution "right there" with just a bit of common sense.
I have to admit, I gave up after a while and my printer has been collecting dust for four years now. I simply don't have the motivation to dedicate the time to clean and fix it. The printer also needs some new parts and I don't have the energy to decide which hotend to go for ):
Ah I didn't know you were doing this. One of my printers has a problem nobody has had an answer for. A wavy pattern on the +X side of all prints. Also on -X but not as pronounced. I've basically stopped using that printer.
Hey Tom, great video! Question, what camera is that you were using at the end of the video? The quality actually looks pretty good compared to lots of other cams. (The cam that is mounted to the printer.)
Thank you for the video. I would like to know how to reduce or eliminate corner bulge. I use an Ender 5 and Ender 5 Plus, and tend to use a wall speed of 40 mm/s, so I'm not going too fast.
I was half tempted to send in a photo of my Voron Trident build and be all "help, it doesn't print!" but it doesn't even have an x-gantry assembled yet...
I went back to some of your early videos and was noticing how your "English accent" has evolved over the years. Your English still "sounds German", but you now breathe more naturally (in the "right places"), add more nuanced expressiveness (pauses, tone, volume), and vary pitch (not just volume) for more effective emphasis. I have two friends (siblings) who moved from Germany to the US at ages 8 and 10, and 35 years later their English still is not nearly as expressive as yours. Then there's your fellow countryman Stefan of CNC Kitchen. Though Stefan still sounds "very German", the evolution and improvement of his English is beyond amazing. His "heavier" accent has awesome emotional expressiveness, even when he's clearly struggling to enunciate the English syllables correctly. What's natural for you is still hard for Stefan, but he doubles down on his expressiveness. Hearing you speaking English together, each with your unique differences, breaks my brain a little. In a good way. My second language is French, and to this day my accent very faithfully mirrors that of my last (and best) French teacher, who came from a petit village an hour south of Paris. Which I speak using my American brain and limited high school vocabulary. Which, when I visit France, causes the French to treat me not as an American with a good accent and poor vocabulary, but rather as a Frenchman with a mental deficit. Which I count as a win! Both you and Stefan have FAR greater English fluency than I have in French. I'm not even close. But I'll bet my accent is better!
one video I would like to see is, converting a 1.75mm direct drive (or bowden) to 2.85mm, which 2.85mm I my experience is cheaper. I modified my Anet A8 for 2.85mm and I did a copper wire through the nozzle approx 3 years. I did the 2.85mm mod because I wanted to print trimmer line, which prints so well once its dried. 2.85mm has its cons but it also has its pros. 2.85mm petg can be a pain from my experience, heat creep, not melting evenly resulting in jamming. but at 1/2 the cost from my filament supplier worth the troubles. and trimmer line, when dry, prints better as easy as pla
I have a problem with my 3d printer, when i try to print something it prints on the side as it should and it stays on, how ever when it starts to print the actual print in the center it does not stay on and i have even tryed buying a new bed on it which had some left over resin on, and now that i have tryed the new bed that arrived im very concerned about if i should buy a new 3d printer or if there is any way to solve this problem
I recently had a bag clog on my ender 3 pro, I had to take my hot end completely apart and even trim about 3/8" off the tubing and reassemble. now I seem to have little micro gaps randomly through the layers, that wasn't doing before, any ideas what could help resolve
Do you have any experience with coasting in cura? I feel like that might help out with the first problem shown, and you don't need pressure advance on something like klipper.
What if printers used metal or non-flexible belts/chains/gears instead of rubber belts? The less flexible something is, the longer is _should_ last without 'stretching'.
Do all fdm printers (non direct drive) have a standard bowden tube fitting size/thread, specifically on the FILAMENT FEEDER(not the print head fitting)? I have an Ender 3 pro and the fitting on the feeder motor with the geared teeth always loosens. I think I have an alternative, but Im having a really hard time finding the right part.
Are there any slicers with higher level control parameters so they're easier for people with less experience? So you can specify what the priorities for the print are: speed, surface quality, weight, shell integrity (i.e. no holes), etc and then that tweaks a bunch of parameters rather than you doing so explicitly. That would seem like the long term ideal to strive for. I've only ever used Cura which I've read has a lot of controls so perhaps this is closer (at least a bit, anyway) to how it works in some other software.
Cura allows you to choose what parameters you want to see or you use most - you can use the basic setting which does pretty much everything for you or switch to advanced and fine tune the settings .
Did you change the extrusion width to 1mm at 7:54? I didn't know you could print a 1mm width with a 0.4mm nozzle, that is a good tip. The max I tried is 0.55mm width
I've gone with 0.8mm if my feed rate is low enough for the filament I'm using, so with 0.2mm layers I can still push 80mm/s at 0.8mm traces, or 0.6mm with 0.3mm layers but that's the edge of it, and PETG might not like it too (e-Sun one up to 0.6mm at 0.3mm layers and 60mm/s but not more, it will under extrude above that combination). Takes quite a bit of testing to check if you filament, temperature, hotend and nozzle can all handle each mode. I like using 0.4mm outer walls for fine details and 0.8mm skins to get those tops and bottoms over quickly.
@@Kalvinjj I have some corner warping issue with some models with sharp corners like squares. No matter what I try(brim, mouse ears, etc.) it still warps just tiny bit. I figured this would be a good thing to try on those shapes!
You say that many modern printers have pressure advance active and tuned by default. Which printer models do you mean? No manufacturer advertises such details.
hi, i made a 3d model a while back with very bad topology, it literally has 10 million faces. i really don't want to retopologize it since i already put 5 months into it, will it 3d print?
My ender 3 pro nozzle can only get up to 160 degrees. All connections tight on main board. I’ve replaced thermistor. I checked barrel hot end heater with meter. 17.5 ohms the bed heater is fine. The message I get is “heater Failed Printer Halted Please Reset”. Please suggest what to check
My auto adjust mode keeps sending the cr touch off the bed so I have to touch the cr touch sensor so it doesn't send the nozzle straight through my bed 😬...please help
Nice job man!:) I just started printing with Ender 3 V2, looks like my problem is my type of PLA is really the cheapest one, so i always need to use Raft because its not sticking, but its good for learning and testing, and clean the bed so the raft Can get sticking, But the model itself sadly not... (cleaning with window cleaner) Damn, i need someone in my country who can diagnose Any problems.. >:D
hi can you help me please iv recently had to change my heat block and nozzal iv watched all the videos possible on the right way of doing it and my printer is ok but prints are not so good i used to have a good 80% over hang but i have nothink no zero tollarence on eny over hang just saggy layers hanging down i have a picture but don't know how to get it to you to show you ??? if you could get back to me that would be great thank you
Hey, my nozzle got clogged, and so I tried to remove the nozzle, but it just wouldn’t come off. I think that the filament got stuck between the nozzle, and that other part. How do I take the nozzle off safely and replace it? (Idk if this helps but I have the Voxelab Aquila x2 N32)