I have tried printing several files with 0.2 nozzle. However there is always issue even at the smallest bridges.
Can someone kindly advise please?
Thank you in advance.
Show more detail of your benchy please.
Which slicer did you use?
Which speeds?
Did you calibrate your extruder?
hi @xchrisd, thank you for responding to my issue again.
I used the Luban for slicing and its recommended default settings of Fast Print.
This is how the benchy looks like:
I did the usual calibration for levelling the print bed. It is not the same as calibrating the extruder right? I could not find any extruder calibration option. Do I have to do it manually?
I tried printing again using the default settings of High Quality. And this is the result:
Everything I printed with the High Quality seems to be okay except those areas that are overhanging.
The speeds is the defaults of the recommended High Quality settings.
Here’s the default settings:
Layer height: 0.08mm
Top thickness: 0.8mm
Initial layer print speed: 18
Infill density: 15%
Infill speed: 40
Outer wall speed: 10
Inner wall speed: 15
Top/bottom speed: 20
Travel speed: 60
Initial layer travel speed: 24
Another example:
The roof and the heads of the windows.
Thank you for your kind assistance.
I would suggest you to use a other slicing software like cura or so, if you want to print with a 0.2mm nozzle.
Other nozzle sizes are not supported by luban right not, I guess.
You could get much more fine detail if you have set this right.
If you want to calibrate your machine, search for calibration is a must in the forum.
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Thank you for the suggestion.
I didn’t know that other nozzle sizes are not supported by Luban at the moment. Hopefully they will in the near future.
I am afraid of using the other slicer. Don’t know if you can remember that I tried using Cura the other time and you were the one helping me and found out that there were some G-code issues. Nevertheless, I am going to try printing again using Cura as you have suggested, and see how it goes 
DO calibrate your extruder steps and re-store to the machine firmware, first!! It’s critical regardless of the nozzle size. Most machines were ‘underextruding’ on delivery from reports here.
No need to read the whole giant thread, start about here:
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I calibrated and tested the extruder steps but it seems like the results are not consistent after several test. Decided to reset the extruder steps to its original value and recalibrated and accepted that result.
Did a benchy print with the Luban slicer. The result is still the same.
Going to try Cura slicer and see how it goes.
By the way, how would I know if mine is underextruding? Seems like after altering the extruder steps, the result of print is the same as before.
The problem is that in Luban there is no way currently to let the slicer know you are using a different sized nozzle (0.4mm standard). Because of this the printer is extruding a volume of plastic that is 4x greater than it should be (area of circle with 0.2mm diameter is 1/4 that of a circle with 0.4mm diameter). It is also slicing the model with the assumption that your walls are 0.4mm thick, this will result in walls not contacting and supporting each other properly.
With so much extra plastic being extruded and unsupported walls it is not surprising that overhangs & bridges droop massively.
What you calibrated was the amount of plastic being driven/fed by the extruder gear into the hot end, the second step to calibrating your extrusion is to print a hollow box with one wall thickness and measure the thickness of your walls to confirm the correct amount is being extruded out of the nozzle.
Take a look at this thread to understand extruder calibration better:
You will need to start using a different slicer such as Cura, Slic3r etc. to allow for different nozzle sizes.
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Thank you very much for the information.
I see. So instead of testing by letting the filament runs again just like the doing the calibration, I will do the second step of printing a hollow box? One wall thickness is the same as one perimeter? So it will be 0.2mm if I am using a 0.2 nozzle, and 0.4mm if I am using a 0.4 nozzle? I did not come across any mention about the second step of printing a hollow box in that thread. Probably I have missed out. Will try to go through that thread again.
I have tried using Cura slicer with the Snapmaker profile for high quality print and the result is still the same. 
Can I use the default settings by Cura instead of the one from the Snapmaker profile?
May I ask how does one go about changing the settings for different nozzle sizes? I tried researching and watching videos, and gathered that I will need to adjust the speed and temperature.
Thus I made the following changes in the Cura slicer:
- initial layer height from 0.16 to 0.1
- printing temperature from 205 to 185
- initial and final printing temperature from 205 to 200
However the above changes did not help and I am unable to print bridges and overhang properly.
I am still learning and trying to understand what the different settings do. My current issue is the stringing, overhangs and bridges. I have tried whatever I know and am very lost now. Any suggestion and advices would be greatly appreciated. 
This is the guide I usually point people towards for calibrating the extruder and should include the second step I mentioned:
I dont know what version of Cura you are running but from what I know you would need to change a value called line width under the quality category. To access this setting you need to click on the gear icon by “Quality” (see image below) and tick the parameter “Line Width” to display this in your settings bar. This should match your nozzle width so set it to 0.2mm.
Currently you are printing in Cura but still using the snapmaker default profile which has the nozzle set to 0.4mm so I am not surprised the result is the same. You can simply modify that one line in the snapmaker profile you have in cura and I believe you should see the result you expect!
What I would suggest is to put your temperatures back to your original settings for now and first see whether changing the parameter I mentioned fixes your problem for the most part. The initial layer height you changed is fine. If you see a much better print after this then that is the point where I would say you can start playing around with temperatures to find what gives you the best print quality!
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Thank you very much for the link and information.
I am extremely excited after my last attempt.
I was testing another print after going to the “manage printer” to change the nozzle size to 0.2. I guess it then automatically changed the values under “Quality” which you have advised. I left the previously changed temperature as they are. You are right that it is the Line Width that has to be changed.
Finally there is not stringing at all. The overhang and bridges look great!
So do I still change back to the original temperature after this print?
My next issue will be to eliminate those lines caused by the nozzle on the print surfaces when it travels across them. Are they called combing?
In Luban under Retraction, there’s a “Z-hop” setting so the printer will raise the nozzle on non-extrusion moves. I don’t know what that’s called in Cura but I’m sure it’s there.
There’s also usually settings to try and optimize the path of non-extrusion moves to minimize the time it goes over existing same layer previously extruded. I vaguely remember it from my slicer3 days.
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Thank you for the information.
I will try to search on that for Cura as well since I will now have to use it and to generate G code from there.
By the way, this is how it looks underneath the print.
The overhangs and bridges look kind of stringy and not smooth. Has it got to do with the temperature setting?
Thank you everyone for your time and kind assistance to the issues I have been facing.
You guys have been a great help and motivation.
I have been facing these issues for months and kind of stuck. Finally there is some progress. So excited to start printing stuff again.
Helping ourselves too. Eventually I might want to try a small nozzle and this will be a record of what worked. 
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Im glad to see that your issue has been solved (at least partially) so quickly!
This is the real value behind having a community who all use the same machine. If you have issues in the future it is much better to just post on here and draw from the wealth of collective experience than to sit stuck for a month cursing the machine/hobby when it could potentially be a simple fix!
If your changed temps currently work then you should be fine. I just said to change back as your original temps were 15 degrees higher and didnt want to possibly introduce another issue before your original problem was fixed! I would suggest you research and print a temperature tower to find the optimal temperature for your material, this is something that generally should be done to gain the best quality prints when using new materials.
Those overhangs you printed are quite extreme and so the quality I can see from your image is acceptable in my opinion.
To try and further improve the quality you could try a few things:
- Slow down your print speed
- reduce your print temperature (there will be a minimum for each material where any lower and you will risk underextrusion/feed problems) see my comment on printing a temperature tower
- Print with more walls such that there is greater support for the exterior perimeters
- Print infill first before walls (this may cause lines where the infill contacts the interior perimeters to appear so would only suggest this as a last ditch attempt unless you are also increasing the number of walls)
- Print using supports, generally for such a great overhang angle (>45 degrees) people would print parts with support material
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I forgot to mention, to selectively slow down print speed on extreme overhangs such that the rest of the print is compelted at a normal, faster speed i.e. making the print take the least time with maximum quality. You should try experimenting with bridging settings.
The bridging settings has the software automatically detect walls that are printed with minimal support i.e. extreme overhangs and will apply custom settings to these parts of the print. This way you can reduce the material extruded and the print speed for these sections specifically whilst the rest of the print is carried out at a much higher speed giving you a significantly faster overall print time compared to just having the hole part print at 10mm/s for example
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Thank you very much for all the great advices, guides, and suggestions.
Thank you, I will look into it. 
Okay thanks. At least now I roughly know what is the benchmark. 
I have not reached that stage nor having the knowledge of controlling the number of walls yet. I also do not know we can control which part of the print to print first, eg the infill and walls. Will be interested to learn that. Definitely a long way to go for me to learn all that. 
I have only tried using support once. It was a pain to remove and I accidentally broke some parts away while removing them. I know there is no escape from support especially for more sophisticated prints. I have some stuff which I wanted to print and require supports. Another area to explore and experiment.
That is very good to know.
So basically everything will be printed as per normal, and the printer will change accordingly to the settings just for the bridge when it is going to print them?
I will explore and experiment more on this. It surely helps when printing stuff example like the benchy.
That is very good to know.
So basically everything will be printed as per normal, and the printer will change accordingly to the settings just for the bridge when it is going to print them?
That is correct.
I recently replied to another thread talking about how you can modify your support settings to make them easier to remove:
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Thank you for the link~