Tag: troubleshooting

One side of print looks great, the other looks horrible.

A user recently posted this summary on a help forum. Temperature and cooling play a big role in part quality of 3d prints. The user had their PLA hotend temperature set too high. Additionally, they were underextruding and had their retraction settings incorrect. 

Many 3d printing problems can be resolved by going to the basics. Calibrate X, Y, Z, and your extruder. Make sure your bed is level. Run a retraction tower and a temperature tower. Make sure your filament is dry.

I see a lot of people wondering why their 3d prints have little zits and voids in them. One of the potential reasons is because their filament has collected moisture. Filament is porous and collects moisture over time. Most filament manufacturers do a pretty good job of ensuring that filament is dry when it gets to you, but not always. Usually, moisture is absorbed when filament sits around in the house for a while.

When water is heated to 200 °C, like when you are printing with PLA, it turns to steam and then escapes, leaving little pockets on the surface of the project.

To ensure that you don’t have to worry about this, make sure that your filament is dry. You can do this by vacuum packing your filament if you aren’t going to use it for a while, using a filament dryer or food dehydrator to dry out filament before use, and keeping desiccant near the filament to absorb the moisture from your filament.  

Someone recently showed a picture of their 3d printed 25mm calibration cube. Unfortunately for them, however, it was not a cube at all. It was a 25mm x 12.5mm x 20mm shape. 

When digging into the problem a little bit, it turns out that they had changed some stepper motors and firmware and accepted all of the default values. If the firmware has not been specifically written for your printer, the default values are most likely wrong. Same thing for the stepper motors. If you replace stepper motors, make sure that your X, Y, and Z steps are correct. Using Marlin based firmware, you can set your X, Y, Z and E steps in the firmware before flashing or you can use the M92 command to update. Using Klipper firmware, you must set your rotation distance.

3d printing, inventing, experimenting, they all go together. One of the unfortunate side effects of experimentation is that I sometimes get myself in trouble. I checked a couple of boxes in Cura, just to see what they did. Then I forgot about it. This made for an interesting couple of days while I tried to figure out why all of my holes disappeared when I sliced my model. Upon further research, it turns out that this setting does have a good purpose. Sometimes, designers will introduce internal cavities into a model to suit a particular manufacturing process. These don’t work well when 3d printing, so rather than forcing designers to remove all of the internal cavities Cura just included this button for them.