A wile ago I posted a poll about printing precision for fitting together parts

3D Printing
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A wile ago I posted a poll about printing precision for fitting together parts and I learned that most people don’t have the problems I have. After the results I went into a rage fueled processes of trying to fix all the issues…

I hope me solving my problems help others with not so luck printers to solve their problems to! Here are the things I found:

  • My hotend was wobbling, but just in the center -> 0x0 diagonal.
    I was only able to tell because, on the first three layers, the solid infill was going all the way over the perimeters and lowering the 0x0 screw did not help.
    Took the hotend out, made some paper discs and placed in between the hotend and the extruder. Problem solved!

  • I really thought my printer was calibrated!
    All mechanical tests were OK!!!
    But just to be sure I made a 10x10x10cm cube and printed with a 0.3mm nozzle. For my surprise, not only I had an error of ~2% , but also XY were not symmetrical!!!
    After a little try and error I was able to fix that too.
    But this is a weird one, because now I can’t manually travel with the extruder to the extremes of the bed, it stops short…but the prints are the right sizes!
    (maybe someone else knows what is going on here, I use Marling, Slic3r and Pronterface)

  • The extrusion was not calibrated either!
    Again, it was mechanically calibrated, I ask for 10mm extrusion and it does it. But I still use a 3mm extruder and with the 0.3mm nozzle, there was too much pressure builtin up inside the chamber.
    Lowering MAX_FEED_RATE on Marling made the outside perimeters much cleaner and solid infill smoother.

  • I suspect my heatbed is really really warped!
    And there is nothing I can do for now, because the table my printer is sitting on is not flat at all. So first I need to build a new desk…

After all this, I’m glad to say I’m now part of the people with prints that only need light sanding! Yay me :smiley:

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Before desk try adjustable legs.
Also I didn’t catch your printer model.

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@Alex_Koukarine , what you mean by adjustable legs? On the desk? On the print bed?
It’s a home made Prusa i3 wood frame stile.

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@Andre_Frazatto I think he meant on the printer.

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Now that you have the mechanical aspects calibrated the last remaining step is to thermally calibrate your filament. This will help avoid having to adjust the mechanical calibrations to compensate for thermal differences between different spools of filament. I use these clips with great success.

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@Kevin_Danger_Powers I never saw such a feature in a printer before, I’ll check it out.
But I need a new desk any way hahahaha

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@Andre_Frazatto E.g.: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:232984

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@Andre_Frazatto you can print some adjustable legs.