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Sep. 26th, 2012
I decided to devote tonight to tweaking. Specifically, to making my "wheel" model as clean as possible.
The issue is that as long as the extruder is hot, it drips out a tiny bit of plastic, so when it's not laying any down (because it's transiting to another part of the bed) that bit beads up and wipes off the next time it hits a part. So, if you have two parts on a bed, then there will be "seams" (vertical lines of blobs) where they're closest together. So, crud.
I tried a few ways of fixing it: first was just extruding less plastic. Doesn't seem to hurt, doesn't seem to help.
Then I tried to reduce the time it takes in transit, by going from 50mm/s speed to 150mm/s when it's in transit. That worked, but again didn't seem to really affect much.
Next up was upping the distance that it retracts the filament. See, when it stops extruding it runs the motor backward for a bit to stop exactly that from happening. I changed it from 0.6mm to 1.6mm, and it helped a little but not much.
And that's when I had my big revelation: looking at the parts, I was chasing down smaller and smaller seams but they didn't fit any better. Because they're not round.
A part that is supposed to be 30mm diameter and circular is a little bit oval-shaped. Not noticeably, not such that I can tell without calipers, but it goes between 29.2 and 30.1. It's a little narrower on the y axis.
Crud. Crud crud. That's actually a giant pain to fix. There's no slicing setting for it, you have to tweak the potentiometers on the motherboard, and you need a digital multimeter to know what to tweak them to. So, I'm thinking I probably just won't bother. There's a chance that it's a print-bed-leveling issue, which I can fix with tools I already have, but if not, meh. Good enough.
The issue is that as long as the extruder is hot, it drips out a tiny bit of plastic, so when it's not laying any down (because it's transiting to another part of the bed) that bit beads up and wipes off the next time it hits a part. So, if you have two parts on a bed, then there will be "seams" (vertical lines of blobs) where they're closest together. So, crud.
I tried a few ways of fixing it: first was just extruding less plastic. Doesn't seem to hurt, doesn't seem to help.
Then I tried to reduce the time it takes in transit, by going from 50mm/s speed to 150mm/s when it's in transit. That worked, but again didn't seem to really affect much.
Next up was upping the distance that it retracts the filament. See, when it stops extruding it runs the motor backward for a bit to stop exactly that from happening. I changed it from 0.6mm to 1.6mm, and it helped a little but not much.
And that's when I had my big revelation: looking at the parts, I was chasing down smaller and smaller seams but they didn't fit any better. Because they're not round.
A part that is supposed to be 30mm diameter and circular is a little bit oval-shaped. Not noticeably, not such that I can tell without calipers, but it goes between 29.2 and 30.1. It's a little narrower on the y axis.
Crud. Crud crud. That's actually a giant pain to fix. There's no slicing setting for it, you have to tweak the potentiometers on the motherboard, and you need a digital multimeter to know what to tweak them to. So, I'm thinking I probably just won't bother. There's a chance that it's a print-bed-leveling issue, which I can fix with tools I already have, but if not, meh. Good enough.