Hey everyone. I am brand new to 3d printing, so the past few days have been a bit of a learning curve. After assembling the artisan + enclosure, I went through the normal setup steps.
Initially I had a ton of issues with 13-12 and 13-18 errors which I seem to have resolved by getting the lengths of the bowden tubes corrected, ignoring the manual and setting the filament spools so the filament goes directly towards the bowden tube. I also printed some rollers and added bearings so the spool turns a little more freely based on the wiki.
I kept having a ton of adhesion issues on the textured glass plate (tried skirts, brims, rafts, the prints kept getting knocked over) so I switched over to the smooth glass side + some glue and had much, much more success. But then I doubled back to make sure all the calibration was correct when I switched to a new spool of filament.
So far I have done the following:
- Calibrate e-steps. Using the dual extruder, it was accurate to within ~2mm with both extruders, stock. I know ideal is less than 1mm, but I don’t have a flexible machinist rule with metric, so I was trying to gently eyeball against my caliper so I’m assuming a little error. Within 2mm seemed “accurate enough” given my inability to get a really precise measurement.
- Level the bed (I switched from the stock 5x5 to 9x9). I did this automatically. I verified this using cura’s autotower plugin with the 200x200 pattern, scaled 175% for x and y axis, but not z to keep it a single layer. The only issue was a tiny, tiny gap at the very beginning of the print of maybe 5mm.
- Z offset - I did this calibration automatically at first, then using the sensor. When I used the sensor I had issues because I could feel the card making contact with the nozzle but it wouldn’t wrinkle as described by the guide. Eventually I decided to just go back to the automatically set offsets. I know manual is ideal but without the card behaving as described I wasn’t sure. I know it is a “touch” thing and I haven’t developed the touch yet.
- Used cura autotowers temperature tower to set the correct temperature for my filament
- Used cura autotowers flow tower to figure out the correct flow rate for my filament
- Used cura autotowers retraction distance tower to figure out the correct retraction distance for my filament and extruder
- Used cura autotowers retraction speed tower to figure out the correct retraction speed for my filament and extruder
- Used cura autotowers speed tower to figure out the best speed for my filament and extruder
Do these steps all make sense and the order make sense? Am I missing anything? Do I need to rerun all of these steps every time I change to a new filament? I assume I also need to do some of these steps when I switch to a different bed?