All right! Congrats!!! And best of all it's working!
Printable View
Couple questions here as I continue to read and dig into this whole 3D printing thing! Question for QIDI and S3D.
I read about setting the Z offset ... do we need to do this on these machines? Doesn't leveling the bed to a specific height to the nozzle accomplish this type of thing?
Has anyone calibrated the e-steps? If so how did you do it on these machines? Going to look into this more later.
No Z offset needed.
Esteps is calibrated with Extrusion Multiplier.
I was thinking about trying the Micro Swiss all metal hotends since I'm messing with PETG now. Any luck with the high temp PTFE? And how hot have you run your hotends? I set mine @ 250 C which they easily hit during pre-print, but they sag maybe 7 degrees for the entire duration of the print. I'll have to do some more testing because I can't tell if it's a control issue, or some other limitation. My main concern is damaging the PTFE but I suppose that's just a minor inconvenience (fumes aside).
Edit: it was basically established after the quoted above that PTFE typically degrades and out-gasses around 250C.
According to some of the folks selling hardened and all metal nozzles, the PTFE tube's heat conduction is an issue with higher temperatures. They state that the PTFE cannot adequately support speeds of 60mm/s and above at higher temps because the PTFE cannot conduct heat into the filament quickly enough. Replacing the PTFE is ~5 or 10 cents when purchased in bulk, and with a properly sized cutting jig it couldn't be much simpler. And at this point replacing a worn brass nozzle is pretty darn cheap too at ~$2.50/each. So if it takes 800-1000 hours of printing time to wear out a nozzle is that really significant? Some of the nozzle sites state that unacceptable wear can occur within a single roll of filament. Even if true, at $2.50/nozzle it still seems just a cost of operation.
Ok, so maybe I am nitpicking here, but doing a calibration cube ... well, more like a calibration pancake! 20X20X2 - I am getting a consistent 1.97mm height. What can I do to affect the overall printed height?
Here is a slightly different approach to calibration:
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1708777