I am really struggling with getting my Treefrog printed perfectly again. I have tried everything I can think of including temperatures, different amount of wall thickness, different layer heights, different PLAs (both different colors and different manufacturers).
I have printed tons of these before with great success but not any more 
See reference photo from my current exhibition.
Do you have any tips on what can be wrong here?
Have you tried pointing a fan at the print during printing? It looks like the PLA is too hot and curls up.
I did get one max-temperature the other day which was fixed by connecting a loose wire to the temperature measuring board. I have currently a 60mm fan connected which should be more than plenty. Running it at 70% right now but I have tested at 100% as well. Hmmmm. Could the actual temp measurement be broken?
What is your infill density? They look really sparse for the angles needed to hold perimeters on the back properly.
My suggestion is fan and denser infill.
It is actually 0 infill BUT all my previous frog are printed at 0 as well.
See if you can get a real thermometer to double check that your hot-end is getting to and holding at the right temp.
Exactly what I was looking for at work today. Hard to find one that goes up to 250. I will tomorrow switch over to the other heads termo-coupler to see if it makes any difference. Just noticed that it becomes a bit better at 230 but I have never actually printed at this temp before. Something is broken…
Pardon my ignorance, but I read a post with vaguely similar symptoms. The fix was a slight change of scale. The specific user changed the scale by 5% and solved the problems. Easy enough to give a try, I would think.
@Rojer_Wisner , that post the user had scaled things down so drastically that the wall of a thin-walled object became thinner than the nozzle width that he was printing with. The frog is a solid model, scaling it shouldn’t affect it like this.
Ah, I did see that the frog was a solid, but I thought the reasoning behind the success of the other fellow’s results had something to do with the stepper motors holding on half steps. My bad.
It’s all good, asking questions is how we learn.
I don’t know if this is helpful, but I’ve successfully printed that frog hollow with zero infill also. I used slic3r and I have “Generate extra perimeters when needed” checked. I also specified 3 top and 3 bottom solid layers.
If you’re printing at 0% infill, the part that is failing is basically a really steep internal overhang with no support. You say you’ve printed them at 0% successfully before, I’m guessing you’re using Cura? Cura recently changed slicing engines. Before it was using skeinforge, which would print all top- and bottom-fill areas perimeter-to-perimeter, which would use lot of extra material on some models, but made it more able to handle this type of internal overhang without holes or curling. It was a strange procedure though, and left strands criss-crossing an area that was supposed to be hollow. The new Cura engine probably doesn’t do this, which makes it less able to handle this type of internal overhang, but results in truly hollow prints that were impossible in skeinforge.
Thank you all for the comments. I do not think the lack of infill is the problem here but rather faulty equipment. I have decided that I will rewire all the cables to the sensors tomorrow and see if it makes any difference. I am guessing that I am getting temperature variations.
Ps. Same version of Cura is being used.
Last week I realised that my issue where due to a non-standard fan mount. Changing to a more tested design solved the issues and my frogs look good again! Thanks again for all the help!
YAY someone who replied with the fix for their issue!
This was the culprit: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:43148
