Yeah, I’ve been doing them, although most of them are telling me things I’ve already figured out (e.g. temperature, retraction, bed level) making much smaller parts*. The PID autotune doesn’t seem to complete, and the linear advance test hasn’t given me any usable info yet.
I guess I am using “over-extrusion” inexactly. On delivery, the A350 is calibrated so that its e-steps under-extrude: that is, 88mm of filament is extruded when 100mm is expected, That would be the feed of the filament into the extruder.
What I am seeing with my prints - and again, this is likely exaggerated by the gooey matte PLA I am using - is an over-extrusion at the nozzle. This can be managed with the flow parameter in Cura. With the stock PLA, a flow of 98% worked well; with the matte, it is more like 80%. I’m not at all satisfied with the PolyTerra matte, it is variable in diameter and in winding, and the surface finish is just awful.
- Setup/testing procedure: I have been using the Strain Relief component of the Heated Bed Cable Saver as a test piece: it is tall enough for walls, it has a few sharp corners, and two through-holes that are prone to stringing. I have been aborting test prints as soon as they go wrong (failed bed adhesion, layer separation, nozzle hitting over-extruded filament) and using a dedicated Cura profile for all the tweaks. To save changes I made the Cura config directory a Git repo and have been doing commits when a solid improvement is made to the profile.
EDIT: just saw this:
Does PID tuning work on SM2? (short answer- Nope)
…and this:
Improving print quality
The latter making me think that perhaps my expectations for PLA in general, and this matte filament in particular, are unrealistically high. The side walls of my prints look like
Update #6
…which received the comment “the variations you are seeing are completely normal and you would be hard pressed to reduce them much further”.