Tag: 3dprint

It’s not secret that 3d printers rely on heat, and that they need to have a constant source of heat. So, what happens when the temperature outside gets colder?

If you live in a temperate climate where the winter temperatures aren’t that different than summer temperatures, lucky you. You probably don’t need to do much, if anything. For the rest of us, we’ll probably need to make some adjustments.

I live in Texas, you will need to experiment for yourself to see what works best for your own situation, but this is what I do in the winter.

Set up my enclosure. Summers here are hot and the enclosure holds in too much heat. In the winter, though, I need to keep all the heat in so I put my enclosure back on. Turn up my bed temperature by 5ish degrees to help adhesion. I also include a G4 (dwell) command in my Cura start script to give my bed a little more time to heat up. Usually, 5 minutes dwell time is sufficient to get the whole bed at a stable temperature.

When 3d printing, the filament actually is extruded when laying down a surface (obviously). But when the printer needs to skip across a hole or change layers, it actually retracts the filament into the nozzle for a short period of time. This is a good thing. If these settings are off or if the printer were to stop retracting, you would find a stringy mess of filament across every hole or void in your print.

There are two settings that I want to describe:

  • Retraction distance: this is the amount of filament that the printer pulls up into the nozzle. As you can imagine, timing, speed, and retraction distance are all related. If your retraction is set at 6mm, but your acceleration and speed are set so high that the printer only has enough time to extrude 3mm you are going to see some issues on your print, which brings us to the second point.
  • Retraction speed: this is the speed at which the printer retracts the filament. Set it too high and your extruder might strip your filament. Set it too low and you will have stringing.

One of the best ways to optimize your retraction is to print a retraction tower. However, printing a retraction tower requires you to update your retraction settings at certain intervals in Z. If you don’t have the ability to do this, trial and error is another alternative that gets you pretty close. Just update your retraction settings by a small interval and see if there is an improvement.

 

“Dad, the fence is down again!”

We live in a rural area and have animals. As anyone with animals can tell you, there is always something breaking, always something to do. Whenever possible, I like to have my boys (ages 10 and 13) fix it. I think it teaches them responsibility and gives them problem-solving skills. 

In this particular case, a fence bracket had broken. I could easily have gone to the store to pick one up for a few dollars. But miss out on this great opportunity to teach my boys something? Nah, not me. I had been looking for an opportunity like this. Something that needed to be custom made. A part that was pretty straightforward, but did need to be a certain size for it to function properly. This bracket needs to fit right, but it would also be forgiving. After all, it’s just a fence.

My boys had tinkered in Fusion 360 before, but it had always been just to create random toys and things that didn’t have a specific function.

“Go get my calipers from my toolbox and meet me outside.” We talked about how to measure parts to make sure they fit together and how to make sure that you have gathered enough dimensions. Then I turned it over to them to design. After many trips outside to confirm measurements, we had a design. Then we 3d printed one. It worked, the very first part off of the printer worked.

Whether they end up as engineers or not, these boys will have some valuable skills.

For Christmas, I’m making the famous leg lamp from “A Christmas Story” for one of my family members. He’s always been a big fan of the movie and the leg lamp has become a running gag between us. 

However, making the lamp does pose a few unique problems. One issue is that I will need to run an electrical wire through the leg itself to provide power to the led light that I will put in it. I figure I have two options, I can either put a hole through the leg in the cad and then print it that way, or I can change the print settings. What I’m trying first is to create the leg with 0% infill, but I’m increasing the number of exterior walls to compensate. Hopefully this provides a leg that is still structurally sound, but allows me to put the wire through the inside of the leg.

There are a lot of ways to find interesting things to print using a 3d printer. Thingiverse, or other stl repositories are abundant with files to download and print on the printer. You can commission an artist to create something for you. Join a Patreon group that creates figurines for your tabletop game. But, sometimes you can’t find what you are looking for online or just want to create your own.

There are many available tools, with more being created all the time. But, there are two that I use consistently.

For functional parts, such as when I create 3d printed widgets to replace broken things around the home or when I create photo stands for my family, I use Fusion 360. It’s subscription based, but it still seems to provide the most tools and provide the ease of use that I’m looking for. In fact, it’s so easy to use that I often have my 10 and 12 year old boys make stuff instead of doing it myself. I look at this as a valuable learning experience for them, especially if they ever end up in some type of engineering role for their careers.

For more artistic parts, I use Blender. Blender has a pretty steep learning curve, but there are tons of online resources available to help with that, including many video tutorials. 

Ringing. Ghosting. Wavy walls. They all are the same thing and they all come from vibrations in your printer. A loose belt on a printer can cause a significant degradation of your prints. When I see that I have wavy walls, I start by checking to make sure that my belts are tight and that my rollers function smoothly and that they are tight too. From there, I cycle the motors back and forth, one axis at a time. Make sure that the look smooth. The human eye is not great at approximating large distances, but fantastic at noticing small changes, such as a roller that has a slight bump in it at a certain point in the axis.

Once I am convinced that my printer is mechanically as good as I’m able to make it, I pull out my software tricks. I enable resonance tuning in Klipper and run the resonance tuning test part. I typically get different values for the x and y axis, as they tend to resonate at different frequencies. This does a pretty good job of removing any remaining vibrations out of the system.

During the summer, many places are hot and dry. As the weather cools off and most places start to have more rain, your filament can pick up some moisture too. This can cause stringing, zits, blisters, or voids in your print. You can avoid this by making sure to store your filament in a dry location and dehydrating it before you put it on the printer for use. 

For those using Klipper, they just released a pretty major change in the way that they store files. When I updated to the latest version all of my config files disappeared. As I looked into it, there seemed to be a lot of other people experiencing the same issue. It turns out that my files did not disappear at all. They were still there, they just had the incorrect file permissions. Here is how I was able to fix it after some Googling.

First, ssh into your pi and take a look in ~/printer_data/configand ~/klipper_config.

If your files are in one of those places, then you should be fine. If neither of those folders has your config files, then that is a separate issue entirely and you should reinstall moonraker and klipper. If you were able to see the config files in your ssh session, but not from your web access, then run the following commands in ssh.

cd ~/moonraker
git pull
./scripts/data-path-fix.sh

Someone recently wondered why they were losing details on their prints that they were making with their FDM printer. To be fair, the best way to get really good details in 3d prints is to use a resin printer. They are just better at it. However, if your situation dictates that you use a FDM printer, there are a couple of things that you can do to get a little more detail from your prints. 

First of all, reduce the layer height. Many slicers have a default layer height of 0.2mm. This means that you will definitely be able to see the layer lines and lose a significant amount of detail. Each machine is different, I’ve found the best setting for mine to be 0.08mm, but you should experiment with different settings to see what yours is. Most FDM printers are more accurate in X and Y than they are in Z, so this will resolve a lot of your problems.

Another fix that you can try is to reorient the print. Lithopanes, for example, are usually printed vertically. Even though the structure is more stable laying flat, it’s difficult to obtain the detail needed for a lithopane in that orientation.

One side of print looks great, the other looks horrible.

A user recently posted this summary on a help forum. Temperature and cooling play a big role in part quality of 3d prints. The user had their PLA hotend temperature set too high. Additionally, they were underextruding and had their retraction settings incorrect. 

Many 3d printing problems can be resolved by going to the basics. Calibrate X, Y, Z, and your extruder. Make sure your bed is level. Run a retraction tower and a temperature tower. Make sure your filament is dry.