Look at the enclosed picture:
This is (a remake of) the AA battery holder. It keeps on breaking somewhere on the righthand side, after about 3cm in height.
I checked that my platform is really level, and if it were not I would not expect this to have any effect 3cm up.
What could be causing this? A draft maybe? (Maybe from one of the fans, even though I am not cooling the object and have no fan pointed towards it.)
Some additional info: I tried this a few times, with different layer height (between 30 and 36) and also tried varying the feed rate. Each time the part cracked open after about 3cm.
I may be wrong but having find this same issue in some prints I think is warpping.
The bottom of the part stays flat because the hbp keeps it warm enough but at a certain high the printed part cools down and warps.
I would do a quick test chambering the printer, letting the printer open only in the top.
No, the trick is to go more fill, or take your exact skienforge settings and just lower the carve height by 0.03 so for example mine was 0.39, I would lower carve to 0.36 or 0.35 thus each layer gets a little more "smashed" into the previous layer. This also is the hot tip for overhangs such as printing the spiral DNA thing.
So I was wrong :-) is good to learn new things, thanks!
If I got it right, the trick is lower down the layer height. Now a question… would it also work a tiny increase in the flowrate? or slow down the feedrate?
What would you do if with the "cracking issue" settings you're already having to deal with some blobs due to too much plastic being smashed over the previous layer?
:-) please try to avoid the answer: "get a stepper based extruder and get your settings right!!" :-)
Thanks!
Got my AA battery holder printed. The problem is that the warping that tries to crack the piece was stronger than the bonding. More fill was not really something I could set (it was at 100%) but I did notice that the fill was not really 100% in reality.
Lowering the layer height was not possible (it was already low) but I changed the width over height from 1.4 to 1.25, which causes the strands to be closer together so they bond better together.
The other thing I did which did not help (so don't bother trying that) was to move the extruder stepper fan to the side. I have used a slightly larger fan which cools the stepper motor much better and it blows a bit of air past the motor. That is now blowing off to the side but alas that did not help.
Ok, I'll just try to educate, rather than blatantly say upgrade and give you some tips to at least reduce your ills.
First, print from SD card only when using the DC motor MK5 and trying to print extremely accurate. Trust me, it makes a difference no matter what other people say. There is physics and math behind the reason. It all revolves around max latency which is hard to measure or account for. Those curved ends tend to make this happen more, because a curve has more points in a given distance that must be transmitted.
Honestly, you can increase the flowrate or smash the layer, they both result in the same bonding action between layers. The flowrate to feerate is also basically a ratio, so changing either one does work too—although, we've all said run a DC motor wide open 255 and always use feerate speed to adjust actual thread width. The flowrate will change with a DC motor when PWM is less that 255 due to voltage sag when the heaters kick in. Also, it was for a long time locked out that the motor wouldn't even run below 255 in the firmware. Pretty much meaning your only choise is to slow down the feedrate (go at least 2mm/s slower than what you have now.) I find that the calibration cubes doen't help you get this right. Perfect fill (we look at the top surface normally) will actually cause poor bonding in tall walls. A slight overfill is actually where we want to me with any mechanical part, especially anything that need to be water tight.
I honsetly am no longer runnning any DC motors, so I cannot think of other tips.
No, and I think you misunderstood layer height. I meant the carve-not first layer height. One is in skienforge carve tab, the other is your start gcode, or now the calibration in the firmware.
Lowering the layer height was not possible (it was already low) but I changed the width over height from 1.4 to 1.25
I wouldn't have messed with the width over height ratio as that just determines the nozzles path, for layers beside each other not the current layer to the previous layer, it's not the correct way to fix the problem.
Messing with that will mess up a top layer fill and cause lots of other problems.
And just FYI, I'm cussing skienforge too trying to get support material to do what I want. Lets say the correct options to use it are not obvious. Turn on raft, but uncheck the right options, then mess with more settings. I could write a book about how crazy this plugin is.
Well, actually the width over height did fix things and the top fill is fine as well. Yes it determines the nozzle's path, putting more layers side by side, which implies there are more layers bonding to the next vertical layer as well. It does work.
My carve layer height is at 0.35 and I don't get good results going lower than that.
Regarding SD card or not, I have tried printing from SD and through USB, back when I had the MK5 and now with the MK6. No difference whatsoever on the Mac. The Mac is just so much better than a PC in multitasking, you wouldn't believe it if you didn't see it. The only time I was "able" to make a print job stall for a second was while starting up VMware and letting the virtual Windows come out of suspend mode.
All is well now. Calibration seems to be a never ending job…
Here is a picture of the success.
I actually printed two that are fine. Now printing the covers…
To Jetguy: MK6 printed that. I've been running the MK6 for about 2 months or so already…
Was this printed with PLA or ABS? How many extra shells did you have enabled? My experience is only with ABS thus far. But if you have it set to no extra shells and a high infill the infill will cause stress on the single wall as it shrinks, which will cause the exterior wall to crack like that.
Extra shells are actually a lot better then a higher infill. They will make the part much stronger. However adding extra shells is not always an option because of that lovely SF bug where it decides to omit extra shell and infill altogether on thin features and in a few other instances.
Since this object essentially just has walls (aside from the bottom) I set fill to 100%, so the fill pattern and extra shells have no effect.
I hope the SF bug about extra shells gets fixed at some point but it certainly did not cause this problem.
My small camera isn't the greatest for macro and the picture was downsized quite a bit. The object has been photographed straight from the printer, before sanding (which I needed to do a bit to make it fit inside the top part of the assembly).