Sunday, March 8, 2015

Adjusting Your Slicer

Part of a series on installing the hotend.

Compensate for Improvements

I don't want to say my Ubis hotend was bad but I usually had to have the hotend set at 200˚ or I would get pretty consistent clogs and failures. When I first got the Printrbot I was able to print around 190˚ and when it got cranky I'd had to print at 220˚. I usually had to set my flow to around 85% on the Ubis to get good measurements at 200˚ but that needs adjustment as well. With your new hotend you'll want to dial in your settings again. Find the perfect settings.

For me I was able to transition down to 185˚ for most prints with a little tweaking for the first layer to get optimal bed adhesion. I'm still working things out, but the temperatures I want for optimal printing will be a little easier to hone in on.

You can also speed up your print quite a bit. Of course the final speed you'll want to use will depend on how complicated your print is and how your filament reacts at certain temperatures, but I moved my minimum print speed to 60mm/s without issue.

Compensate for Cool Zone

You need to make sure that the hot filament doesn't retract into the cool zone on the new hotend. It'll lead to clogging and general bad feelings. The official documentation said that the furthest you'd could use 0.5mm-1.0mm for retraction, but I found occasional failures using 1mm. I'm sticking with 0.5mm for now.

Test, Test, Test

As with everything you've encountered on your 3D printer you'll want to experiment for a while to find the prefect settings for your filament, weather, altitude, etc.

Your Printer is Almost Perfect

 Just one last thing before you are done.

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