One side of my prints are awful

TLDR; one side of my print is totally falling apartAttachment 10657Attachment 10658Attachment 10659Attachment 10657Attachment 10658Attachment 10659

Hello! Total newb here. My wife bought me a 3D printer for father's day because she knows that I like to tinker with things and I had shown some interest in the one at my son's school. She purchased me an FLSUN delta 3D printer on Amazon and having received it, as a software engineer I felt pretty confident I could work through the Chinglish instructions and get this thing running. Which, largely, I did with varying degrees of success. That led me to looking up every calibration video and thread I could find and largely that helped produce much better results. However, after hours of looking through threads, I am at a loss. I have an issue on 1 side of the printer that persists no matter what the print settings are. I have leveled, auto-leveled, made adjustments to the printing parameters, but it persists, reading through these forums has been the greatest source of knowledge to me since I began and I'm hoping that someone can point me in the right direction. Images available, I was unable to attach them; presumably I am still too new to the forum. And thank you for any help you can provide.

Print temp: 1st layer 210 then 195
Bed temp: 1st layer 65 then 55
Retraction 2mm, -0.6 on restart
Print Speed: 50
Layer ht: .1

What material are you using?

pla - look at the temps.

Okay it's definitely not a calibration issue.
Your first layer is going down fine by the look of it and the print is reasonable for at least the first few layers and that's mainly what bed calibration is for. So what you have is a print head that's not moving properly or filament that isn't extruding evenly.

You've probably either got a loose belt or a slipping gear on one of your stepper motors, or possibly a dodgy connection.
Check your extruder as well. Make sure the filament feed tube is as short as it can be without creating any sharp bends.
It could be that on that side of the print, it's struggling to push the filament smoothly. Or it could be slipping at the extruder itself.

Also why are you changing your print temp from the first layer ?
Pla is much better printed at 210 throughout. You want to print as hot as possible to reduce back pressure from the nozzle.

here's a thought. Switch the machine on. Home all axis and then with the stepper motors locked. try and see if you can move any of the carriages by hand. If any of them move even a little bit - that's probably your culprit.

Here's my delta 'blog' might be something of use in there for you as well. http://3dprintboard.com/showthread.p...t-a-delta-kit-)

As far as I can see all deltas are pretty much identical. The basic principles and mechanics are anyway :-)

(looks up the flsun) - Hmm, don't like the look of that top mounted extruder, that could definitely be causing issues. Try it on the side, like mine, reduces extremes of curvature on the filament feed tube. .

You can assume PLA from the temps, but if he's using ABS at those temps.... I only ask because he didn't specify.

Thank you for the replies!

Marm, sorry, a total rookie mistake on my part. It is PLA 1.75MM

Curious Aardvark, I had read on a FLSun thread somewhere that better print results were achieved when the extruder temp was lowered after the first layer to reduce stringing. (Hasn't helped much) I was attempting to tackle the stringing initially. In my mind, it makes more sense that it would be better if the print were executed at a consistent temp, layers adhering at a consistent rate and all. I'm just getting in from a birthday party but will look at my motors in short order. I'll definitely be looking over your blog as well!

Connections seem to be ok. Swapped connectors just in case. So after stopping the motors, there was a little play on one of the motors, and being Delta it's o that general side. I broke down the top, adjusted my belts, recalibrated my stops, homed, and tested that there was no more play in the mechanism. Sadly the issues persist. I did note that there is more play on the 1 arm on that side, pivotally, than the others, but movement wise in my tests it did not seem to make a noticeable difference. Set the extruder temp to 210 across the board.



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Moving the extruder to the side to see if that helps

what slicer are you using ?

To be fair I get a lot less stringing on my delta than on the makerbot clones.

My retraction settings are 1.8mm and 60mm/s speed.
I get zero stringing between multiple parts, and almost non within a print.

You definitely look like you've got massive over extrusion going on there.
Your print speed is really slow, I've defaulted to between 75-100mm/s for pla on mine. Once I've got a print cooling duct in place I'll see just how fast i can print pla. Can't see 150mm/s being out of reach :-)

Have you checked you nozzle size ?
Most delta kits seem to come with multiple sizes. I'm using the 0.5.
Have you measured the diameter of extruded filament ?

Also have you got a ptfe tube in the hotend, between the top of the nozzle and where the filament guide tube ends. If there's a gap and it's pushing through a 'pool' of melted pla, that could also give you irregular extrusion.
Mine wouldn't extrude for more than a couple minutes before I added the tube. She hasn't looked back since.

Currently, I am using Slicr with Repetier. Just completed a test with the speed turned up to 100mm/s. The issue is still present,. Watching the extruder tip closely it almost seems that the tip is dragging in the previous layer, if that makes sense, there is no pla on the extruder tip, which is a .4 to answer the previously asked question. The tip and pla measure correctly. There is a ptfe tube in the hotend. I'm going to attempt a print in Cura out of curiosity.

You did check the gears on the stepper motors were all tight.

I have to admit the auto levelling, made absolutely no sense to me and as I have a perfectly flat bed. Just levelled with my adjuster bolts for the heated bed.
But given that the first few layers are going down fairly clean.
I don't think that's the issue, still leaning towards some kind of mechanical issue.

Although if the auto levelling tells the printer the bed isn't level and to adjust for a non-level bed then that would probably be carried through the whole print.

Can anyone actually explain how the whole g29 measurements are used. I tried to follow the he3d video, but it didn't do what his did on the video and the maths made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

I did check that the motors and belts were tight. I locked the motors and pushed down on te carriage and did not find any play. I've tested the bed with and without issuing the G29 command.

I spoke with Dave, FLSun's English speaking support guy, last night. he remoted into my computer and went through the settings himself and we ran several prints at varying speeds and temps. I completed a 195-degree print at 50mm/s this morning that is no better and no worse than previous attempts have been. Where it was previously only on one side, I have noted that it does happen on other sides as well, largely the left and rear, were you facing the printer. Dave, at one point, was shocking his head and saying, "it's just wierd"

No, using Cura returned a similar result, but much more efficiently sliced.

have you tried a different nozzle ?

After last night's call with their customer support I was able to get a print I that would say is 96% correct. It involved many corrections, but the biggest corrections came with playing with the extrusion multiplier in Slicr's settings. The extrusion multiplier says it's typical range is from 1.1 - .9, but we're playing with it at .6 and .5. I forgot to grab the cube I printed last night but it is smooth on 5 sides and only a little warping at the X on one side. Temp is down to 205, printing at 30mm/s. Will print result this afternoon

so somewhere down the line your machine is being given instructions to extrude around 2x the actual required amount.

Well at least my diagnosis was spot on :-)

Sounds daft, but Have you checked the filament diameter is set for 1.75 and not 3 mm ?

I noticed that when i loaded a standard delta profile in cura it set 3mm filament.

30mm/s ?
lol the slowest I've run mine with pla is 75 :-)
It's a delta - put the pedal to the metal ;-)

I did go down to 20 for filaflex. But hey, it's not supposed to print it at all !

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After many fixes with DAVE, the results are improving. The top layer, now, is weak, but I am hoping to fix that. I am also 50% of the way through a more techinically difficult print, as I have my concerns with the solutions provided to achieve these results.

Sorry about the delay, this is my busy time of the year and was out of town when a family emergency came up. Haven't had too much time to tinker. After MUCH adjusting I have gotten it to print o.k., it has some issues that I've been back and forth with their CS about. One is that at the end of any print one stepper motor will just ho off in the wrong direction while the other 2 home. They've sent a new board in my absence that I will be installing alongside a new stepper motor.

Now that I have a proper moment to follow up on my progress. Thanks to everyone that pu in their knowledge on this. After much tinkering, and measuring, and calibrating, I can get decent results. The initial measurements for several of my parts were off, some significantly, and correcying these in Marlin went a long way towards fixing the previous issue. I also lowered the extrusion multiplier from 1 to .75, you can see the improvements in the filament guides. Small prints seem to work exactly as expected. Larger prints have developed an issue where a layer, or 2, will randomly shift along the x axis, usually in the positive direction, although a couple have shifted to the negative.

Could this be a slipping belt? I had an issue with that tower, but the belt tension seems ok. I had assumed if it were stepper related the misaligned layers would be consistent, whereas this is nearly random.

I'll try that this evening. The odd thing, to me, is that the golden colored filament guide was printed only 15 minutes before the larger print (a child's mask) was started with the same exact settings. Simplify3D - I gave up Slic3r and Repetier.