Author: Jonathan van Heijzen

Coasting and wipe distance are two settings that can affect the quality of your 3D prints.

Coasting is a setting that tells the printer to stop extruding filament a little bit before the end of a perimeter or an infill line. This helps to reduce the pressure in the nozzle and prevent oozing or stringing. Coasting can also reduce the amount of blobs or zits that appear on the surface of the print. However, coasting can also cause gaps or under-extrusion in some cases, especially if the coasting distance is too large or if the filament is not viscous enough.

Wipe distance is a setting that tells the printer to move the nozzle along the perimeter or the infill line after it stops extruding filament. This helps to smooth out the end of the extrusion and reduce any excess filament that may ooze out of the nozzle. Wipe distance can also improve the surface quality of the print by hiding any imperfections or seams. However, wipe distance can also cause over-extrusion or dragging in some cases, especially if the wipe distance is too large or if the nozzle temperature is too high.

Both coasting and wipe distance are useful settings that can help you achieve better 3D prints. However, they are not mutually exclusive and they may interact with each other in different ways depending on your printer, filament, and model. Therefore, it is important to experiment with different values and find the optimal balance for your specific situation. You can use a test model like this one (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1363023) to see how coasting and wipe distance affect your prints and adjust them accordingly.

Level first, then mesh, then Z offset. Or do I set the Z offset first, then level then mesh? Or is it…

I always start with mechanical functions, then move to software compensation. No sense in trying to set a Z offset on a bed that’s tilted 20 degrees. Where would the offset even apply to? The highest point? The lowest point? I’m not sure.

First, set your mechanical level. This is done by turning the screws and making sure that your bed is mechanically aligned to your nozzle. Next, set your mesh to compensate for any variance in the bed flatness. I don’t use Z offset, I haven’t had to. But if you do, this is the point that you should implement it. The machine has a sense of where the bed is so it is able to apply an accurate Z offset.

Sometimes prints will have issues only at a specific height. The symptoms may be poor fill at a specific height, layer shift that always occurs at a certain Z, or something else that seems to consistently occur at a certain height.

When this happens, I start looking at, and around, the lead screws for Z. I look at the motors, the screws themselves, and the bearings. When I inspect the lead screws, I make sure there are no physical issues, such as nicks or dings in the screw itself and that the lead screw isn’t bent in that location.

I had a mishap over the weekend that made me have to stop my print. The print was too long and I had too much into it to want to start over, so I decided to print the other piece and glue them together.

As I was doing it, I noticed how well the pieces fit together. I’ve done this in the past and the parts didn’t fit together well. I’ve spent a lot of time tuning my printer and making sure that it is printing to the proper sizes.

I realized that one of the benefits of this effort is that, when things do go wrong, I am able to put the pieces together because the sizes match.

This post wrote itself over the weekend. I was printing a bracket for my wife. Estimated print time was about 32 hours. Before I went to bed on Saturday, I checked the amount of filament and realized that I needed to change spools in order to be able to finish the print.

M600 to the rescue. So far so good. Simple task, just press M600, let the nozzle get out of the way. Take out the old filament, put the new filament in, press resume. Good to go then I can go to bed.

When I did so, I pressed the button for one of the macros that I created, “Extrude new filament through Bowden tube.” As soon as I did, the machine started to home itself. Now I’m in trouble. You see, because of the size of the bracket that my wife needs, I had to use up pretty much the entire bed. What this means is that when the machine homes it would come down on top of the already printed material. I had to e-stop the machine. Now what? Well, I measured the height of my print. Dropped that much material through the table in Cura, then printed the rest of the print. When I glued them together I ended up with a tiny seam. But a little bit of primer over the seam made it disappear.

Then I removed the homing sequence from my macro.

I’ve seen a number of people asking for functionality related to controlling or monitoring their printer remotely. The easiest way is to set up a Raspberry Pi and attach it to your printer. With the price of Raspberry Pi’s right now, though, this is a significant cost. I’ve had good luck with Armbian on a Le Potato that costs substantially less. After some experimentation, I ended up replacing the firmware on my printer with Klipper and putting Klipper on my Le Potato. It’s been working great.

If the sides of a calibration cube are a little bowed, there are a couple of things that I would look at.

  • e-steps/rotation distance (Klipper): if your extruder is extruding too much material, the material has to go somewhere.
  • calibrate Z: same thing as above, if your z steps are off, you might not be moving up as much as you think you are. The extruder is calibrated to extrude a certain amount of material. If you end up extruding more material, it needs to go somewhere
  • pressure advance: your nozzle may be oozing a little bit and causing your sides to become bowed

The quick answer: Yes

When you first start out 3d printing, you most likely will not know whether that stringing issue is caused by poor retraction settings, temperature settings, or something else. I don’t do it anymore, but when I first started 3d printing I kept very detailed logs that included every parameter setting, as well as the ambient temperature, the type of filament used, and a description of the overall 3d print outcome.

I found these records to be very valuable in troubleshooting. They provide a lot of insight into what might be wrong when I change filament or what has gone out of whack if I don’t change anything on my printer but it just starts acting up.

After a while, two things will happen.

  1. Your machine will get more dialed in. This is just a natural result of tinkering with the settings and getting incremental improvements out of it over time. Once your machine is dialed in, any parameter changes will be pretty minor.
  2. Your knowledge will grow. You will start to intuitively know what setting needs to change based on how your printed part looks.

It’s not necessary to keep detailed logs indefinitely. When you are starting off though, I can’t think of any better way to build your knowledge base.

I notice that new users often post something similar to “I just got my first printer, what should I upgrade first?”

My answer is usually “nothing…for now.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to upgrades. But this post is more specific to new users. There is a lot to learn when you first start out 3d printing. Proper temperatures, speeds, loading your print correctly. There are slicers, different cad packages, and the list goes on. Don’t add more complexity to the situation by upgrading a bunch of items on your printer. Learn your printer. Once you feel like you have a good handle on the stock printing process, maybe try out a small upgrade and just work your way up from there.