I’ve been working on calibrating my 3d printer/Cura settings and am having trouble reducing oozing. I originally found that I was overextruding. After fixing that, I’ve tried printing temperature towers and am finding that 180-200 produces the best results.
Here are the settings I’ve tuned:
E-steps: stock → 243~ (forget exactly)
kfactor .22 → .05
temperature → 195
flow rate → 91.32
filament size → 1.7~
Now, despite varying my retraction distance (.5 mm to 5mm) and retraction speed (10-60mm/s), it seems like I have the same oozing issue.
(The last tower in the line is .75 mm retraction all the up. You can see the globs on the size of the tower. I did this to prove that my “Change at z-height” scripts in Cura were actually working).
Your settings look to be fighting with each other. Filament size 1.7 thats 2.9% out of spec and decent filament should be within 0.03%. Is 1.7mm a measured size? Set that small Cura will be increasing the extrusion. Then you have set flow rate to 91.32 to reduce the over extrusion caused by the filament size. What settings did you start with when you did the E-steps test?
I think it would be worth going back to basics. Set extrusion to 100%, measure your filament in a number of places or if it’s good stuff set it to 1.75mm, then check your E-steps and print a calibration cube. Adjust E-steps to fit. Do a temp tower to check temperature for that specific filament then when all that looks sensible and not fighting work on the stringing.
Also what filament are you using? Do you get the same result with different make/colour/type? Some filaments string more than others.
If still stuck there are some other ways to reduce extrusion effects in Cura detailed in this article but best to try and sort the problem in my mind.
The E-steps I tested multiple times and am confident it’s within less than 1 mm.
The 1.7 filament width was a measured value using the snapmaker filament (both white & black). Then I got to the lower flow rate by printing a cube with .4 mm walls and measuring the width. After reading your message I printed some more cali-cubes and realized it was underextruding. So I am now dialing that in.
However, for anyone that sees the picture I have, I separately discovered that the change-at-z retraction setting I was adjusting (with linear move OR firmware move) did not seem to be working properly. When I changed the overall retraction distance on the print, I got a different (much better) resulting print.
Are you familiar with Cura Change-At-Z? Under Retract Style you have options “Linear Move” or “Firmware”. I tried both, neither seemed to work as expected. At the least, they did not change the setting I thought it was changing. That, or there is some confounding variable in my testing.
Thanks MooseJuice. I noticed that the one delivered with the snapmaker has more issues so I actually invested in a dehydrator-box this week and some dessicant. I had a better, not perfect, print with that after some drying. Of all times, my oven is actually broken right now so I can’t just try drying out the spool that way. The white filament I was using for the towers in my original post I got as an add-on later and seems to have somewhat less problems than the black. I recently got a spool of red Eryone’s PLA+ that I’m excited to try out, just not sure how much calibration I’ll need to do for PLA+ vs PLA aside from changing the temperature.
