Transcript:
Hey, guys, back today, with the video of some quick tips on how to improve the quality of your prints. If you’re an experienced maker, you will definitely know all of these, but I thought this might be helpful for everyone being quarantined and just now deciding to play with their 3d printer. Time stamps for each tip will be in the description down below. The first tip has to do with improving what is called. Z Wobble Z Wobble will often look like a very poor quality print, but inspecting further can lead you to the culprit. The vast majority of times that Z wobble is occurring. It’s because your carriage or hot end is not set up and tightened properly while holding your frame with one hand and your nozzle on the other at room temperature. You can easily see if this is an issue. Just give the nozzle a bit of a shake, and if the carriage and hot end are not tight, you will have a noticeable wobble or FreePlay. Any free play on your hot end or hot End carriage will cause this Z wobble. The same is true for your hot end setup itself. You want to make sure and do your final tightening when your nozzle is that around 240 degrees Celsius, This is obviously very hot. So make sure you wear proper gloves While doing this, you can definitely over tighten and break the heat break, so be careful to just tighten without using too much force. If you only tighten everything while at room temperature, the expansion could cause a gap, which can allow for a small amount of free play in your nozzle itself, as well as losing of material. If you have any old plastic bearings on smooth rods or if the metal ones are just attached via a zip tie, check to see if you have a decent amount of free play. Their plastic bearings may need to be replaced after thousands of hours of printing and zip ties can lose their strength and need to be replaced. This is going to be true for all. Fdm machines, regardless of setup. You want to make sure the hot end and carriage setup is secure without any FreePlay anywhere. If possible to avoid, you can see on the screen now. Prints for the hot end and carriage were not tightly held together on the left and then what the exact same. G code looks like after harnessing everything without free play on the right for most inexpensive non Delta printers, you will be battling between Z wobble and ghosting attempting to find a happy medium in between you see, having everything on your printer be extremely strong without any free play anywhere means you may not be dispersing energy properly, which can lead to ghosting or echoing This is especially true in Cartesian machines, where the bill plate moves back and forth in machines with a heavy direct extruder setup or a printer with very high acceleration and jerk settings. Personally, I print most things with a lower acceleration and jerk than most other makers. Since I don’t mind waiting a little bit longer for my prints to complete, but you can play around with those settings at your own discretion. I have a video dedicated to mitigating ghosting, which I will link to down below, but essentially, if you want to stiffen your inexpensive printer without built-in dampening, then you will want to reduce acceleration and jerk settings and add some sort of dampening to the feet of your machine. Some people really like to bolt their printers down to a sturdy table, which can still print very strong, high quality parts. I would just assume that the ghosting issues would be increased another issue that can lead to Zee wobble but can also lead to layer shifts is having to loose of a belt belts on non Delta. Fdm printers are used to move carriages in the X and Y direction via the turning of a stepper motor, the teeth on the pulley grip onto the belt, meaning that any slip could lead to a layer shift If your belts are droopy without much spring to them, you’re going to want to tighten them when possible. I prefer to print a belt tightener and add it to my printers so that it’s much easier to make everything springy. I don’t know if there’s a real science to how tight you want your belts to be since you can definitely over tighten, but I always just make sure that there is zero sag or droop. You could see on the screen now. Some prints that were plagued by consistent layer ships continually getting worse. The looser. I made the belt until the point I actually caused a belt pulley to loosen from the Stepper Motor. That’s when it got a little worse than what I would call a leadership. I then tightened everything up and we’re back to the print quality that I normally get having tight belts is also true with core XY machines, But surprisingly I didn’t see any real loss in print quality in my FL Sun Delta. I can only assume that it isn’t smart to have overly loose belts, but it seems to be more forgiving on a Delta machine, and the next tip is on reducing warping and delamination. As many of you may know the majority of warping issues are caused by your material, experiencing internal stresses due to rapid cooling. This is why most people prefer an enclosed environment for your printers, allowing for ambient air to rise, especially when printing materials, such as ABS, which require a very hot heated build plate, this higher ambient air allows for more time for your material to cool down, meaning its probability of warping and delamination are reduced, obviously having increased bed adhesion can help to reduce this warping, but sometimes these stresses can overwhelm even your layer adhesion causing cracking and delamination, but not all of us can have an enclosure on our machine and we’d still like to print a material that has a high chance of warping from time to time. Well, we can increase the time for cooling. Our material via a couple of methods as Nicholas from Pali maker, explains in the material science chapter in my book. Most of the stress release happens right after the extrusion. Indeed, the material will be extruded at a high temperature, then cooled down below its glass transition temperature. It’s during this time above TG that the polymer will release most of its internal stresses, however, if this time is too short, it will not have time to reach equilibrium. Increasing this time period is a way to reduce warping increasing this time period is a way to reduce warping this time period can be increased with the following ways, increasing the extrusion temperature, increasing the room or chamber temperature and decreasing the cooling rate. So following that if we don’t have an enclosure, we will want to print our high warping materials at a high temperature and at a slow speed for something like ABS, you can end up printing at temperatures of around 250 degrees and as low as 25 or 30 millimeters per second for the top speed but much slower for the first layer, this can lead you to really reduce your chances of warping and delamination. Of course you don’t want to go too far. Outside of the temperature range suggested by the manufacturer of the filament. We could see this now on my test with nylon 910 keep in mind. Nylons have an additional stress of crystallization over abs, along with a cooler build plate, but these tips should still help on the. Left, we have a print in high, warping nylon 910 with print speeds of 55 millimeters per second and a temperature of 235 degrees And on the right, we have the same print, But at a max 25 millimeters per second print speed and a temperature of 255 degrees Celsius. They have the same. PVA added to the glass build plate and the same Z height or initial starting height for the nozzle as well as everything else being the same. The one on the left, I actually had to cancel early because it was warping so bad that the print was in the path of the nozzle, creating a lot of noise, the one on the right that was printed, slow and hot did warp a bit, but the difference is night and day between the two. Finally, you can also reduce your warping issues by reducing the initial stress creation itself, as Nicholas says In the book, The Stress is created by forcing the material through a die, which will create a velocity curve, which will stretch and align the polymer chains, reducing the stress creation relies on flattening this velocity curve. This velocity profile can be flattened by increasing the nozzle size, reducing the extrusion rate, decreasing the material velocity or coding the internal nozzle surface with a low-flow resistant surface, so going off that while suggesting printing slower and hotter we’re already mentioned using a larger diameter nozzle is something I hadn’t really thought of Before Having this tip reducing the extrusion rate is actually the opposite, but you can counteract that by going to a lower layer height if you’re printing a large high warping material such as ABS, but don’t necessarily care quite as much about the quality printing hot and slow with a large 1 millimeter diameter nozzle with as low of layer Heights as you can reliably get, which would be around Point 2 millimeters. You should experience far less warping than with your standard print settings well. I hope this video might have helped some of you out there that might be experiencing some quality issues with their 3d printer. As I mentioned. I have a whole book dedicated to helping you figure out your printing problems titled 3d printing failures and this 2020 Edition has that entire material science chapter added by Nicolas toh CO2 from poly maker. If you are quarantined in your house and you’re just now playing with your 3d printer, you should give it a look. If you’re unable to get The physical copy delivered. The Kindle and PDF versions are offered at a discount of just five dollars over at my patreon, all of which will be linked to down below. Thanks for watching everyone. I’ll be back with further tutorials, reviews and fun prints. See you soon and stay safe out there.