Hello!
I’m a new Snapmaker 2 owner, we assembled it last weekend and had a week of fun laser cutting and now printing. Generally I’m really happy with the laser, and the printer shows promise but i think i need to tweak some things to get my print to be perfect. Can anyone please help with that?
Here’s the first complex shape print i did before calibrating the E Value. Most concerning was the extra plastic globs in the Brim around the model, and some around it as well. Since then i’ve calibrated my E value (ended increasing it from 212 to 250 surprisingly, checked it 3 times and it seems to be correct).
Here’s the point i’m at now. I’m really impressed by the wall smoothness (this is Luban’s High Quality preset), but there’s some things i want to improve.
First, all of my models printed so far have had extra plastic along the bottom, where it touches the hot bed. It seems as if they were squished down somehow. The model’s height is just below 35mm, i can’t tell more precisely since i don’t have calipers yet.
Second, i want to call it the roof of the slopes, for example the bottom side of the tail, are fairly uneven. I don’t have any idea what might be causing this.
Last, there’s a bit of extra plastic around the ears of the Calicat, but that’s the smallest problem as i can just cut those away.
Anyway, i’m glad to be a part of this community now And i hope someone will reach out to help.
The extra filament at the bottom is called “elephant feet” its a result of either over extruding the first layer or having the z offset to low.
What your talking about here is “overbang”. SM has issues with overhang because of in proper part cooling. There are ways to improve it but not in luban. You would need to switch to using cura as your slicer.
This is stringing, it can be caused by many things. Usually it can be fixed by calibrating e steps, print temp, and retraction settings.
Thanks for those terms! Will make i a lot easier googling what to do more specifically. I’ve seen a lot of your posts around here, great stuff. I’ll post some results once i try some new settings.
So i’ve been thinking about how to fix the elephant foot and stringing, and reading All3DP… I guess my material settings aren’t perfect, this is the PLA i got from SnapMaker. I’m looking forward to switching to Add:North. But my idea of improving the foot would be to lower the bed temperature and maybe check the Z value again, but i’m pretty sure i configured it “correctly” with a paper test… but I’ll set it a bit higher, see how it goes.
I’ve also done a test print via Cura. At least i generated the GCODE in Cura, then i sent it to the machine via Luban. All the problems seem smaller, but they are still there in the exact same places, the overhang is worse i’d say.
And speaking of that, i don’t have any good ideas about improving my overhang besides supports. Is it possible to make Cura print overhangs at a lower speed or temp or retract the nozzle for a longer time to let them cool? I’m at a loss. Getting them to cool for longer is an idea but I’m not sure how to achieve it.
People have had mixed results with SM filament. Enough to question whether it’s not just good filament, not great qc, or maybe just sat too long while stuff got delayed by covid.
Don’t equate calibrating with setting some perfect setting to print from. You need to look at it differently.
When it’s calibrating the first automatic steps are telling the machine info it needs to compensate for any unevenness in the bed. The final step with the included card is then what gives the reference point for those adjustments, and a starting point for adjusting z-offset. There is no “correctly”.
Every type of filament (and to a lesser extent different brands of same type) has a different preference for z-offset. For the resistance of the card that I like, which is just 1 step less than SM instructions (buckles when pushed quickly, but not slowly) for PLA I use .05 offset, PETG .15 and TPU 0.0 offset.
What you want to do is to figure out what gives you a consistent reference point to start from and that you do that every time you calibrate, which should be whenever you change toolheads/beds.
Overhangs are always tricky and the biggest problem with 3D printing.
There are a couple settings in cura. One is called minimum layer time. That will slow down the print speed (when nessisary) to make sure each layer has a sufficient time too cool. The other is called overhang wall angle and its paired with overhang wall speed. It will tell cura to print overhangs greater then the angle setting at a slower speed (set by the speed setting) witch help increase the accuracy and detail.
But the truth is to get good overhangs an upgrade to the part cooling fan is required.
And i hope someone will reach out to help.