Calibration wizard here. Not in actually achieving calibration, I just spend so much time doing it. Over and over and over!
I have yet to get a single print off the machine. Either the strings follow the nozzle around or blobs sometimes get glued to the bed and the strings anchor themselves to that. Entertaining but not hugely productive.
Can someone explain how I judge if the bit of card is ‘gripped’ when pulled and ‘bulges’ when pushed. I’ve watched the videos over and over but can’t get the nozzle to the right height. Surely it’s can’t be that difficult as nobody else seems to have posted here. I’ve got a set of metric feeler gauges, is there a perfect value for the gap between the nozzle and bed?
I can’t help you with what the sweet spot is for the paper, I tend to stop when I can feel a decent amount of friction, which is very subjective, and use an initial layer height of .16 with PLA.
As for the “perfect value,” I believe that the distance between the bed and the nozzle should equal the first layer height, with some adjustments based on filament (I’ve heard that TPU prefers extra “squish” for example).
This still may not lead to perfect prints, as many people have had trouble with leveling beds but is a good place to start at the very least. I hope this helps!
Thanks for the fast response. And thanks, too, for the thought that I need to consider the initial layer height if I try to do this ‘mechanically’. I’ll try 0.15mm with the feeler gauge and see if that works.
Heigh-ho, you know what I’ll be doing this week-end!
I’ve been using a 0.127mm feeler gauge with good results. I was never able to reliably set the height with the provided card - it was always too low. The feeler has some give to it, so you cannot lower the nozzle onto the feeler. Push the feeler under the nozzle after each lowering step until it hits the nozzle, then raise the nozzle one step.
Initial layer height is something I hadn’t thought of. This would be good to add to the machine profile G-Code in Cura, if it is available as a variable.
Well, after reading Bobby’s post I went back with renewed determination. It paid off! My problem was just going for a tighter ‘grip’ so I was far too low. I set the gap so that I could just feel the nozzle touching the card and, voila, my first print is now running, (Eight hours to go. Sheesh!)
My feeler gauge set has, of course, only 0.10 and 0.15mm in the range we need but I can estimate that the gap is about 0.12mm as the 0,15mm won’t fit and the 0,10 does but catches a bit. That’s in line with your 0,127mm.
So, a note for others fighting this problem. Almost no grip on the card is what’s needed.
That first print is important to me as lots of the filament I have is on reels wider that the silly little spindle that comes with the SM machine. Don’t they have 90mm wide spools in China? Anyway, first print is a replacement spool holder from Thingiverse.
I had that problem at first. What I didn’t realized is that you don’t need to redo the calibration.
After you do it once, if something goes bad, you cancel the print, restart it but push the ‘adjust settings’ button, and there is an ‘Adjust z offset’ option there, so you can make the print start lower or higher! maintaining calibration
Yep, saw that adjustment. But I don’t think it carries over to subsequent prints does it?
I just wanted to get the thing set up properly from the start. Anyway it seems happy now, the test will come when I print the second bit of this spool-holder. Just doing the base at present and that seems to be going OK.
That base for the spool-holder came out fine. The underside looked a bit odd with embedded threads all over the place but nobody will see that!
So many variables! The stl came from Thingiverse, no idea how good that is, Cura slicer doesn’t have a profile for the SM so I typed in what I found in the user guide, but there’s loads of settings in Cura, I don’t know if they’ll have any effect. Add in my basic stupidity and I’m really rather surprised that anything works at all!
The base is printed and the central spindle is started. I’ll have to set the alarm tonight as I think it’ll finish around 2AM. (Um, make that 3AM because the clocks go forward tonight!)
But we have the pesky machine working; it’s not the €1,800 paperweight it was before. Thanks over and over for your help.
You should only need to recalibrate if you change the head or the bed or both. The thin rod for filament support works just fine, every spool fits and the friction stops the spool spooling too much filament that can get wrapped around the rails. Best thing to print first is a Benchy, it’s small and gives a good indication whether all the other things that are important for 3D printing are set about right.
Stick to the basic stuff in Cura as long as you have imported the profile to set it to match the Snapmaker bed size etc.
Even then you only need to change infill and supports depending on the model being printed and bed/filament temperature which depend on the type of filament you are using.
There is a lot of stuff to learn with any 3D printing and this device comes with the added fun of a lazer and CNC.
‘The thin rod’? You mean on the supplied filament holder? The snag is that the rod is too short and I worried that a wider reel would work its way off the rod. Anyway the vertical filament support sticky-padded to the shelf above the printer will be much more secure. That centre spindle has six and a half hours left to print and it’s ten-o-clock here. So bedtime and hope that the printer doesn’t have a problem while I sleep!
I’ve never printed a Benchy! Always seemed to find mods and add-ons for the old Ender 3. Actually I’ve just dragged the Ender out and it fits right beside the SM. I’m a two-printer guy now! (Um, if I can get the bed on the Ender levelled. Humping it around seems to have thrown the bed out of level. [Sigh].)
Yep, Cura seems to be OK now with just the settings from the user guide. I left everything else at the default settings.
The reason for upgrading was the prospect of auto bed-levelling and, of course, eventually trying out the laser and CNC stuff too. Fun will be had.
Thanks for that. Not quite sure what to do with it though but reading through the json text has given me some idea of what to set the defaults to in Cura.
The calibration saga continues. Having successfully printed two parts of the spool-holder the printer has now decided that adhesion is not its thing. So I’m back on the calibration tread-mill again. I’ll get there, - eventually!
First, use the Cura Marketplace (don’t worry, it’s mis-named) to install the curasnapmaker plugin. This will create the basic machine profile for A350. While you’re there, install some material profiles - the generic ones, and those of any filament brands you use.
Then, download the three print profiles (for some reason named Fast, Normal, and High). These are JSON files and they can be imported using the Profile Manager in Cura. In the github repo they are under quality/snapmaker2.
I need to assenble the spool holder than I printed a couple weeks ago. Haven’t fired up the snapmaker in two weeks and have some stuff I need to get printed. I need to determine if the proximity sensor is totally hosed, or just needs minor adjustment, after blobbing a print for one of the filament holder components. This filament-printing technology, it, uh, it kinda sucks a bit
But, like almost everything to do with this pesky machine, it has suddenly decided that it will deign to print the third part of the spool-holder. The only difference is that now the room smells like a ladies boodwar! Yep, I took the chance and used a sniff of hair-spray on the bed.
But you’re right. 3d printing is not exactly a mature technology yet. I guess in ten year’s time we’ll look back at all these shenanigans with disbelief, “You paid HOW much to spend three days trying to get a single print?”
But 'tis working. I’ll fiddle with Cura later; just sitting here basking in the sight of my growing print! Thanks again.
