I’m already 3d printing for quite some time now and already had several printers and filaments on hand but I’m eager to learn every day so I thought I’d ask how you do the tuning of new Filaments and or printers?
How do you proceed in finding the right temperatures for the new filament? What calibration parts do you use? Andy standards? Anything else you would like to share in terms of calibration?
I hope to collect some feedback. Would be great to see where the differences are and I’m sure most of us can use some of these tips.
I’ve always wanted to develop a sure-fire way to calibrate in new filaments. I usually just end up winging it and fine tune temperatures based on how things look.
I take two cylinders and one cube of different diameters and heights and put two around 10mm away, and one further away. And set different retractions and temps based on layer height ( easy to do in S3D, have to hack gcodes together for slicers that can’t change based on layer height). With S3D I can also use different settings based on the model, so I run one as a single wall, and the other ones with different infill%. Run the job and choose the best looking one as my baseline. Then fine tune from there.
I really like the method I use. I do it at the beginning for each roll I use. I get perfect prints with no over or under extrusion.
I first determine the right temperature for the filament by raising the head about 2 inches off the bed and extrude a steady state strand. If it pig tails at the nozzle and never drops down it is too cool. If it stretches and spider webs then it is too hot. A nice steady strand that coils like a rope on the bed is just right. I try to go as cool as possible and have it behave this way. This gives me a temperature for the filament with a +/- 5C range.
Then I calibrate for the physical and thermal properties of the filament. The objects I use are here:
3 help videos for the calibration process can be found here:
Thanks, Jeff. That sounds great. What speed do you use to extrude? The pig tail or not behaviour should be depending on the speed - using the speed that it extrudes while printing would be way too slow I guess?
@Helmi I have never adjusted the free extruding speed. It is the default speed in the Marlin Firmware I think. If I watch how fast the filament strand comes out and coils up it is about 25 - 35 mm/sec. Heating or cooling it with the speed constant gives me good results.
I have noticed that when I switch to smaller nozzles I generally need to increase the temperature by about 5 - 10 C and increase the nominal diameter as if I’m over extruding. For example a filament will calibrate at 1.75 and 200 for a 0.4 mm nozzle and 1.83 and 210 for a 0.3mm nozzle. Clips printed with each setting are interchangeable.
I label each spool of filament for the adjusted diameter and temperature and even nozzle size. Then when I’m printing parts across different printers and different filaments I enter in the parameters of whichever filament I’m using into the slicer and my parts always fit together and are interchangeable.
