SnapMaker extruder calibration

Thanks @Doug. I’m looking on Amazon now. I’m also thinking of changing the metal throat/heat break to one without teflon. I just need to do some disassembly and measurement of the heat block when I get some time.

Has anyone changed to an all metal hot-end on the SnapMaker?

1 Like

Just destroyed another heatbreak with the cleaning filament when I tried to clean a choked hotend…

I ordered new hotends from the snapmaker shop and a pack of 20 nozzles (some different diameters) from Amazon. The PTFE coated heat breaker is the part I can’t find on Amazon so I had to buy it as original spare part. But the nozzles should fit and for the price of € 10,00 it is only 50 cent a piece…
So no need for any cleaning drills or something like that.

1 Like

@rojaljelly I’ve just replaced my third heatbreak. The teflon tube definitely sensitive to temperatures near 250 degrees C. I’ve found I can print PETG well at temperatures below 240, so that’s my limit now. I’m still investigating the possibility of an all-metal modification.

2 Likes

@rick
I’m also with my 4th since November…
Most of my opaque PET-G filaments print pretty fine at 220-225°C and for the translucent ones 230-240°C is ok. I’ll start trying out different nozzles and changing them frequently.

Interesting you had the same experience. I thought the under extrusion on my end was caused by an additional filament guide that I installed in the extruder module to enable printing of TPE/TPU.

The initial FW setting was 92.6 which in my first run only extracted 83mm. After adjusting, I got a slight over extraction and now, after the fourth test, I set the factor to 107.31.

I used SnapmakerJS to connet to the printer, so no commercial slicer was needed.

1 Like

Hi @KateiRen, another data point which supports the contention that the Snapmaker is intentionally set to under extrude.

Here’s a bit of a user report on my experiences so far…

I’ve been doing a lot of printing over the last few months and am really finding the Snapmaker to be incredibly reliable. I am selling quite a bit of stuff now and so reliability is very important to me. The Snapmaker had literally been printing 24/7 for the last month and I couldn’t be happier with the quality and reliability. My only real complaint is the noise!

I can set a print to start and just walk away confident that it will print with no problems. The print bed really appears to be ‘seasoned’ and adhesion is now never an issue. The print bed appears to work best if left alone. I give it an alcohol wipe every 10 prints or so and give it a bit of a scrape with my paint scraper every now and then when printing PKA as it leaves a bit of a whitish residue.

My issues with the hot end are still there but I just have to be very careful when changing from PETG to PLA. I am using eSun cleaning filament and a nozzle cleaning tool (Actually a set of small drills I got from Hobby King) and have managed to stay on the same hot end for a month!

I have a stock of damaged hot ends which I intend to restore with new Teflon once I get organised and get some of the right size. Once I do so I’ll post the results here.

Productive printing to you all!
Rick

4 Likes

I followed the Extruder Calibration from Matt’s Hub linked in the OP above and am having some problems. After calibrating, my wall/line thickness is supposed to be 0.5mm and instead I am getting 1.0mm line width at 60% flow rate which is more than double what I should be getting. My 25mm 1 wall, no top/no bottom cube is 25.50mm wide and the wall is just a hair over 1.0mm (Like 1.02 or 1.03mm) for a single line. I am using Ultimaker Cura 4.0.0 and my filament has been testing out at 1.73mm in the places I’ve tried it so far on this spool. If the filament was a LOT bigger, I could see that increasing the line width a little, but not double.

Before I calibrated, I have printed things that take up almost the whole build volume that were accurate to within 0.3mm.

Originally, before calibration: I was under extruding by 16.5% the first time. I changed from M92 E96 (Not exact, but very close to that) to M92 E111 something (I don’t remember the decimal, but it was E111. something). I ran M500 to save. I ran M503 to verify that the settings were there. I power cycled the Snapmaker and ran M503 to verify the settings were saved. They were. My 25mm 1 wall cube came out VERY hairy…like more hairy / stringy than anything I’ve ever printed. So I ran the extruder calibration process again and it was also off by about 16%, so I scaled up to M92 E132 something. I was so surprised that my next calibration was so far off that I reran the test a couple of times and each time it was still off by 16%. After the last extruder calibration the hairs almost went away completely. (I think I had 3 hairs left on the model after the print… one attached to the skirt, one attached to the lift off, and 1 somewhere on the body. Quite acceptable.) Layer adhesion wasn’t great at ~244 degrees with stainless nozzle. I’m tempted to try 248 or 249 degrees next time, but that doesn’t get me any closer on these line widths.

What is causing my line width to be double what I’ve commanded it to be? My nozzle is set to 0.4mm in the 3d Printer Setup of Cura. I replaced my nozzle with a brand new stainless one thinking that maybe my nozzle was worn open some, but after I took it off and inspected it AND after trying the new stainless nozzle (at a hotter temperature to compensate for the difference in how it heats up) I am still getting 1.0mm line thickness. So, it wasn’t the nozzle.

Also the fact that the most recent 25mm calibration cube came out to be 25.50mm wide bugs me. I watched the print and I’m about 98% certain that it was only printing 1 wall like I commanded it to, so the idea that it was printing 2 walls doesn’t fit, either.

I could understand the bottom lines being thicker as they are squished into the bed more for adhesion, but why would the rest of the model also have double the thickness compared to what I’m commanding it to have?

I’ll try running through the SnapmakerJS slicer (which is Cura Engine based, but MUCH older and MUCH more limited). I can try Cura 3.6.0 as well which is what I was using to print some very accurate large models (using almost the whole build envelope) to within 0.3mm accuracy.

1 Like

Hi all,

Just wondering, why is there no input from Snapmaker staff on threads like this? It seems like the exact kind of post that they would be the only people who could accurately answer the question, including design choices in default settings. Thanks!