Calibration Assistance Needed

I’ve been trying to calibrate my printer and fine tune it a bit but for the life of me I cannot figure out what is wrong. I’ve been printing the calibration cat and his tail as well as corners have been having major issues. I’ll attach some photos. It’s the a350 l, using pla+, I’ve tried various temperature changes and nothing clears it up.

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The calibration cat is pretty cool but maybe more appropriately named the “verification” cat.

Go through the steps in order from https://teachingtechyt.github.io/calibration.html. Not all apply to this machine.

First, check your first layer. Yours is too high and underextruded.
Do a baseline with the cube.
Do e-steps
Flow calibration
Retraction - Many people find 1mm at 50mm/s work ok with a z hop of 0.5.
Temperture
Acceleration if you want, I got better corners by slightly reducing the max accleration
Linear Advance: For me, K0.07 works better than the default of K0.22.

After all that, you may need to tweak the slicers infill overlap, I’ve found prints are sometimes sensitive to that.

These are just my opinions and how I approached it, I’m sure others will have different ideas.

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Was going to suggest what Brent said but he beat me to it.

You also might want to start by printing in the center of your bed.
Tend to have less problems there.

-S

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Also also, you might want to look at doing the blower attachment addon:

Having better cooling should help with the overhangs.

Here are some cube. I calibrated my extruder. It was under extruding for sure.

Just actually tried printing the cube with a -0.10mm z offset and got this. The other cube I posted was at 0

It’s getting better in some aspects. Obviously not there yet.

image
That looks like overextrusion, so if the esteps and flow are correct for the single wall test then there’s additional settings to check out. Could be temp related, could be overlap related, hard for me to tell without watching it print. There’s a lot that can be gathered watching it print. Is the inner wall fine and the outer wall is over extruding? Or is it sagging from temperature? Or is there a jam forming in the nozzle?

Does this help?

I stopped that print here it is from all angles.


Slightly longer starting video

That’s quite the z hop, I wonder if it’s that?

What speed is that? looks fast. Have you tried at about half that speed?

Looks like many of the blobs are at the start or end of a line. Did you end up calibrating linear advance?

Honestly, resolution is too low for me to tell anything definitive. Speed is way fast though for sure; slow everything down until you get good prints, then slowly start trying to go fast.

These are actually the speeds I was printing it at. Wouldn’t this be considered on the slow side?

speeds

I think the speed is not the problem bc I print way faster with better results

can I just change my K Factor from 0.22 to 0.07 or do I have to test it myself? do I change this in the extruder settings in cura or in Luban?

I would recommend Teaching Tech 3D Printer Calibration (teachingtechyt.github.io) as a tool for calibrating linear advance. You can just change the value to 0.07 as that has worked for many on the forum, but I think it is worth it to calibrate specifically to your machine.

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I have noticed watching the print that with this cat (Which at this point I intend to get just right at all costs! lol) that the feet look like they are separating from the raft almost they looked, I don’t know if this is the right word but almost curved like the filament is constricting inward. I feel like this kind of thing could be the cause of the print just not taking from the very beginning.

I guess you are getting too hot at the overhangs because of your small print surface.
Have a look at this:

Print less hot, slower or a bigger model or tower :wink: