Comment on How do I make this work? Or should I give up?
twizttid1@reddthat.com 3 weeks ago
Oh man… Sounds like when I dipped into the hobby… I quickly learned that there’s different aspects to it. If you just want to print stuff you need to sink money into a decent printer like a flash forge adventurer 5m. Set n forget… It’ll print you want you want with little fuss. If you get in on the cheap then the machine itself is a whole other aspect that you need to learn and tune…and with tolerances being so tight in 3d printing … It’s hard!!!
The number 1 thing that fails prints 98% of the time is first layer adhesion.
This can be corrected if you can enable mesh bed leveling… No print surface is perfectly flat. Mesh bed leveling measured 9-12 different points on the bed surface and adjusts for the non-flatness as it prints. The BL touch adapter makes that process easy- but not cheap.
As for your print surface get a glass sheet to print on like a borosilicate glass plate from Geeetech. Make sure you adjust your Z-stop!!
The other aspect that messed with me and really through me for loop was the feeder motors and if they’re feeding enough material. Others mentions step calibration… definitely do this. For me, the arm within the motor that presses the filament against the wheel had a hailline crack that I couldn’t see… It wasn’t applying enough pressure and the printer kept under extruding even though it calibrated right. I swapped those arms out for metal ones and never looked back… But that cracked arm really left me frustrated for weeks until I just unassembled the motor to discover the crack.
It’s only a machine… You can win! Get a few good prints, don’t be too ambitious yet, and get your confidence up… It’s a good fun hobby!
sweetgemberry@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
Thanks for replying. It gives me hope that I might be able to make something of this.
I have a bl auto leveller attachment. It didn’t work because I couldn’t attach it when the bracket it came with didn’t fit my printer. So I was reliant on printing one with a printer that didn’t work. I kinda just ended up zip tying it to the printer head and hoping for the best but to be honest I don’t understand how it works or how to use it.
I do really need to replace the bed on it. It’s in poor condition and it’s still the same bed that it came with 6 years ago. I’ve heard glass is great and adhesion definitely is an issue I keep having.
As for that last one I don’t know how I’d check the extrusion rate. I know it isn’t physically broken because I’ve pulled it apart several times and nothing looks cracked or broken internally.
dnick@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Second on the glass print bed. You can put it right on top of the existing bed and fasten it with binder clips. If it’s thick enough it will span any flaws in the existing bed and be nearly perfectly flat so you have a consistent platform to level instead of dips and waves.
Just adjust the z stop, and then print single layer leveling prints and adjust the bed slowly while it prints. The biggest things to watch for are where it prints too thin, it will look squeezed out, and where it isn’t close enough it won’t stick. It seems like a lot of work but after a few runs it starts to look better. Doing other simpler leveling test prints are frustrating because all you see is the end result.
Another thing that I’ve run into that resulted in leveling issues is if your z heights are different from one side to the other. It’s not obvious, but if the z screw of the left is different than the right, you can level all day but it will still try lifting on one side. Run the zaxis up to about 20mm on the left and then move the head to the right and check the height there. A hiccup or crash in the past could have gotten this out of line, but you can manually bring them back to square by manually turning the screw and get things back parallel.
Last thing that really messes with things when you’re troubleshooting and then abandoning the printer for awhile is filament getting wet. You can get things dead on, but if the filament has been unprotected for a few days, the slight swelling will fight you when you’re already frustrated.
Then, the last thing is measuring extrusion. Raise the head up like 100 mm, Mark the filament 70mm above the head, and use the controls and tell it to extrude 10mm at a time. Do this 3 times and then measure how far away your mark is. By the math, it should be 40mm away from the head. If you’re more than 1mm either way, you’re probably going to consistently see the issues your mentioning and no amount of need leveling is going to solve it. Technically a simple fix, but there is some math and code to send to the printer and someone here can easily help along the way.