Ord Hadron - Z Axis won't move down

both suggestions have merit and will look into both.

The grub screw does appear to stick out a bit.

cheers

When my printer started to do this, I initially thought that perhaps it was times in the print with high flow rates for the filament that the motor could not cope with that were the issue, so I tried turning up the drive on the stepper controller, but in the end this wasn't the issue, so I turned it back down again.

I had another issue when using Cura, where the speed settings were too high for my extruder and the motor started doing weird things when it tried to retract.
However I think you are using Slic3r, and I've never seen those issues with Slice3 and its default settings.

Before the printer arrived I did have a
look at what slic3r and pronterface
were like, I'm guessing that I have
changed a setting in pronterface
which is causing the issue. I can see where
to remove slic3rs settings but cant
revert all of pronterfaces settings back
to default.

anyone have clean pronterface settings?

cheers

BTW.

How did you reset Slic3r's settings? I've never really managed to completely reset it?

Sorry. Cant help with Pronterface either :-(

I deleted the slic3r folder under C:\Documents and Settings\{user_name}\Application Data\Slic3r

The Pronterface settings have no impact while you are printing. The only things that impact your print are either in your firmware (max limits) or in your slicing program. All Pronterface is (normally) doing is shuffling code off to the printer while you are printing. You could just as easily copy the gcode to an SD card and print from that. Pronterface would not even be running during the print.

By far the best place to take care of extruder speed issues is the max feed rate setting in the firmware. If you set it there, it will not matter what the slicing program decides to do, it won't go faster than the max.

Ok, thanks UB,

do you know what the values represent?

Wouldn't changing the firmware settings affect
the flow rate from start to finish?

My jobs start out ok but after about a 6 levels
of the way through, the filament is not coming out.

Changing the firmware settings will only impact the *maximum* feed rate. When the printer is doing this and that, it may (or may not) be able to hit a maximum feed rate. It's possible (though not real likely) that something in the gcode happens to call for a higher feed rate part way in.

The values in the firmware are in units of mm/ second and they are listed as X,Y,Z,E. They are on a line in configuration.h that looks a lot like:

#define DEFAULT_MAX_FEEDRATE {400, 200, 2, 44} // (mm/sec)

Having rational (or at least semi-rational) for all the feed rate settings on that line will keep a variety of odd things from happening. It's easy to set and you have one less thing to worry about.

G'day ub,

I tried your settings but the result was the same.

I have attached 2 examples of the result, I have used these stl files;
[www.thingiverse.com] and

[www.thingiverse.com]

Any chance someone can try these and get a nice result?

Btw my printer is one with a .035mm hotend in case that makes a difference to the max feedrate settings.

Cheers



Btw, the printer I got was this one with the .035mm hot end,

Hi goochy

Check your settings. Your nozzle will not be 0.035 mm it will possibly by 0.35 mm i.e 10 x larger than you described.

Where did you get your kit from? As it should not be this hard to get it to work.


Whoever sold you the kit should have provided a version of Marlin that would work.

The sort of issues you are having should only occur when you are building a repstrap from scratch

Opps, my bad .35 not .035

The supplier is being very helpful working
through the issues.

looking through the forums, there cld be many
varied possible quirks.

I've never done the step by step calibration test, will be doing that tonight.

cheers

Hi Goochy,

No worries.

I was hoping that your issues were just caused by that typo.

Looking at the photos of the prints, there is more going wrong than just the printer stopping after 5mm of Z height.

Have you measured the distance that the X Y and Z to confirm this matches with the commanded distance ?
I presume you are doing it as part of your calibration.

Once you've calibrated X, Y , Z and the extruder, I'd recommend you just print a test cube to start with.

With slic3r delete all the settings and just run the wizard, and enter your filament size and nozzle size, etc

I find slic3r makes really good prints most of the time.
Though occasionally its just incapable of rendering the Gcode at all, if the model is quite complex or generally wierd


Anyway, keep persevering, I'm sure you'll get it working in the end, and you'll be surprised how many uses you'll find for the printer.

If you look at your pictures you will see little bubbles in the extrusion. I'd bet they are caused by moisture in your filament. It won't hurt anything to dry it out and it may help quite a bit. There are various approaches depending on what you have to work with. One is to put the spool in an oven at ~ 75C overnight. You don't want it to be much over that. Others use a box and a light bulb to get a reasonable temperature. The idea is to get a low humidity environment by heating the air. If you happen to have a liquid CO2 tank in the back yard, boil off from it will do a pretty good job as well. Moisture absorption chemicals work, but they are not as easy to check for performance.

Whoa, so now pre heat the filament? :/

This is getting to be a lot of bother, I will persevere, I am hoping to make N scale models easier than styrene and glue.

Or the dog house I will be bound/banished.

Ok, the results of the extrusion test setting pronterface to extrude 30mm at 30mm/min 50mm of filament was used.

goochy

You'll need to change the last parameter in the DEFAULT_AXIS_STEPS_PER_UNIT in marlin's configuration.h

e.g the value is 900 in this example

#define DEFAULT_AXIS_STEPS_PER_UNIT {64, 64, 2560,900} // for MendelMax, 10 Tooth pulley, 1/16 stepping

I think the maths goes like this....

If you value was 900 and its using 50mm instead of 30mm, you'd need 900 * 30/50 = 540

Alternatively, in Slicer you can cheat and change the extrusion multiplier, to be 0.6 i.e 30/50 of 1.0 . However generally the extrusion multiplier is only supposed to be use for fine tuning with slightly different filament characteristics, but to overcome large errors in the printer firmware.

BTW. If its enabled in your Marlin build, it is possible to override the configuration settings by issuing gcode commands that update the steps value and store it in the EEProm memory of the Arduino (ATMega), but I can't remember of the top of my head what the command is - and if this feature is not enabled in your version of Marlin it may not work anyway.

Filament is hygroscopic. It needs to be sorted in a dry environment. If it's out tin the air to long, it pulls in enough water to be a problem. When you heat wet filament you get steam. The steam creates little bubbles in the filament as it extrudes. That makes the print look like junk both from the bubbles and from the uneven extrusion rate. If you leave the filament in it's sealed bag with the moisture absorbing packet in it up to the point you are ready to use it (and use it in a couple weeks), moisture is not a problem.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/03/2013 08:41PM by uncle_bob.

Cool, thanks for the info.
i remember reading that on a forum but the chap was somewhere snowy and cold so figured might affect me.

Hi goochy

I've not come across this issue myself. But I guess you may be in a more humid location than I am.
I keep swapping filament colours, but I put the filament back into sealed bags when they are not being used.

I bought a small toaster oven a while ago, to possibly do some reflow soldering, but never ended up using it, but it now looks like it may be ideal for drying my filament if it gets too damp.

Toaster oven for drying out your filament, I chuckle, I don't chuckle about using toaster oven for reflow soldering, that is perfectly acceptable .

Some success.
With UB and RC and my suppliers guidance, I have managed a result that doesn't look like plastic dolly poo.

I used the Container 20ft model as my test and it has sides, a few gaps were the filament hasn't come out at spots, 90% of the ribs are formed ok, the roof on the other hand is well, not a roof.

I am feeling a tad better in that some more tweaking and guidance from you good learned folk, I might actually have something I can show (boast) to my modelling friends, of course I can't image 3d printing will be as good as styrene and glue that the old masters produce, perhaps another year or 2.

Again, many thanks for all your assistance. I will be doing a considerable amount of tweaking on my day off on Friday.

Cheers,

Some filament soaks up moisture faster than others. You also may (or may not) get dry filament from your supplier. I've had filament arrive without a bag on it at all. There is the obvious variable exposure during the hot / damp part of the year. Right now up here, humidity is not one of my worries.

There is a lot of tweaking on these printers. It's a many days sort of effort. Print small / simple / cheap / fast things and work out the bugs.