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Assembly, first print and calibration

A project log for Owning a 3D printer

Keeping track of prints, settings, mods etc that I do with my Ender 3

johnowhitakerjohnowhitaker 07/11/2018 at 05:020 Comments

Assembly was fun - took a couple of us about an hour, and then another 30 minutes of fine tuning on my part to get the frame all square try to level the bed. 

First print (the test dog that came with the printer) looked great, and my family were suitably impressed:

Next I tried a gear for a design I've been working on. It came out OK, but 210 was a little hot for my PLA by the looks of it. I printed some little calibration parts I made, and got a bit worried - they seemed off. Turns out they just had a bit of a bulge at the bottom (elephants foot) which was solved by lowering some temperatures. Didn't stop me spending ages trying to re-scale things in cura.

The settings I've settled on for now, with my 0.4mm nozzle

Layer Height 0.1 for fine detail, 0.2 for faster prints
Initial Layer Height 0.15 for a better bed adhesion.
Line width 0.35
Wall Thickness 3 lines (1.2 mm)
Top/Bottom layer thickness 5 layers if important, 2 if fast
Top Bottom patterns Line
Infill Density 20% and grid or line pattern
Retraction 6.5mm at 25mm/sec
Print speed 40mm/sec 

Wall speed 20
Infill Speed 80mm/sec
initial Layer speed 20 mm/sec depending on the complexity of the model
Adhesion Type Skirt and Line count 4 (gives time to adjust bed levelling if it looks off.

I can speed things up quite a bit without loosing too much quality, but since a lot of my prints run overnight (he says, after three days) I tend to leave it on this most of the time.

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