Wanhao Duplicator 3

I am not entirely sure but I think the Wanhao and the Flashforge Creator are essentially the same printer. I bought a Duplicator 3 cheap off ebay and decided it needed to make better prints. I also have a Stratasys and wanted to get somewhere near that.

I blocked all the holes up with polycarbonate and installed a fan to blow air through the filament holder tube. I then made a heater in a pipe that fits the back of the printer, joining the tubes together and ran it from the 24 volt PSU underneath. The heater is about 25 watts and is just on. There is no extra input for a thermistor on the control board though there is an output available. If I could get the software sources I could control it but I set it low enough to be on all the time so it is not really important. It takes a while to warm up but makes a huger difference to the prints.

I also wrote a small C programme that adds this:

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G91
G1 Z10
G90
G1 Y50
G4 P15000

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between every second layer to allow the ABS to cool down.

Pictures attached

Five picture limit per post.

Here is the comparison for before and after, it is a 10mm cube.

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Originally Posted by Mjolinor

Five picture limit per post.

Here is the comparison for before and after, it is a 10mm cube.

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That's a good improvement! It takes time to get your printer dialed in and to understand how it reacts to things. But that left hand cube is 'presentable'. As you play with with different filament (and types of filament) you will slowly get better and better quality prints.

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Originally Posted by Mjolinor

Five picture limit per post.

Here is the comparison for before and after, it is a 10mm cube.

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I assume that is PLA?

Just lower your bed temp you should find programming extra steps really isnt necessary.

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Originally Posted by Geoff

I assume that is PLA?

Just lower your bed temp you should find programming extra steps really isnt necessary.

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ABS, solid

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Originally Posted by Mjolinor

ABS, solid

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Really? wow I have never had ABS go that gooey before, how hot were you printing with it?

The Wanaho is the flashforge 3D pretty much, I dont think there is much difference. What firmware version does it say its running?

Temperature was 230. Firmware version was 7.2 but is now 7.7 Sailfish and it is slightly better with the newer firmware.

Quite hard to say from a picture though. 7.7 on left, 7.2 on right.

It gets better if I pause on each layer but it is obvious that I have not got the chamber hot enough yet, it is about 55c and it needs to be somewhere near 70, you can see that from the steps on the edge every two layers. Once I get to 70 I will disable the heated bed as it will not be needed and I will use that input and output for the chamber temperature.

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Originally Posted by Mjolinor

Temperature was 230. Firmware version was 7.2 but is now 7.7 Sailfish and it is slightly better with the newer firmware.

Quite hard to say from a picture though. 7.7 on left, 7.2 on right.

It gets better if I pause on each layer but it is obvious that I have not got the chamber hot enough yet, it is about 55c and it needs to be somewhere near 70, you can see that from the steps on the edge every two layers. Once I get to 70 I will disable the heated bed as it will not be needed and I will use that input and output for the chamber temperature.

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Mind me asking where abouts you live, or what sort of environment?

I run my machine open, often with drafts coming through windows so unless Im printing wood and close it off, it prints ABS quite happily out in the open, so yeah not sure what's happening there. Out of all the plastics ABS is the least troublesome on these machines.
The only real difference lately I have found is tolerance, some will print at 0.1mm while others just cannot, no matter what temp, and will do minimum 0.2mm, alot of it seems to boil down to the colour dye used in the filament.

Can I be honest? I know you sound like a pretty techy person and know what you are doing, but I think you are over complicating what is actually a pretty simple thing. I think this is part of the reason I stuck with firmware revision 1.0, it kept things simple simon. No chamber heat required, hell, the firmware doesn't even recognise a chamber... Replicator G and manually editing Gcode was about as complicated as I ever needed to get.

Anything extra I ever want to do to my machine is run by a secondary raspberry pi, so Zprobes, auto levelling etc.. all done by the pie and I don't have to worry about messing my flashforge firmware up.

If you don't have a heated cabinet then you will never get rid of that slight concavity in the vertical plane and I need to get rid of it. A hole that is 3mm at either end and 2.9mm in the middle is no good for what I need the printer for.

This is done on my Stratasys, absolutely vertical sides and sharp corners. That is what I am trying to achieve then I can get rid of the Stratasys, it is too big.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/dknpowe...tasys/box1.jpg
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/dknpowe...tasys/box2.jpg

The firmware will treat the heated chamber as a heated bed. The heated bed will not be needed once the temperature is up to around 70C, it will just make things worse. Temperature variation in the vertical plane will always cause distortions in the model but size variation from 70 to 100 is a lot less than 20 to 100.

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Originally Posted by Mjolinor

If you don't have a heated cabinet then you will never get rid of that slight concavity in the vertical plane and I need to get rid of it. A hole that is 3mm at either end and 2.9mm in the middle is no good for what I need the printer for.

This is done on my Stratasys, absolutely vertical sides and sharp corners. That is what I am trying to achieve then I can get rid of the Stratasys, it is too big.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/dknpowe...tasys/box1.jpg
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/dknpowe...tasys/box2.jpg

The firmware will treat the heated chamber as a heated bed. The heated bed will not be needed once the temperature is up to around 70C, it will just make things worse. Temperature variation in the vertical plane will always cause distortions in the model but size variation from 70 to 100 is a lot less than 20 to 100.

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strange, I don't get any concavity in my vertical planes using a non heated chamber. I can go up to around 14cm high dead straight, sure 14cm to 15cm is a gamble but up to that it's fine.

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The firmware will treat the heated chamber as a heated bed. The heated bed will not be needed once the temperature is up to around 70C, it will just make things worse. Temperature variation in the vertical plane will always cause distortions in the model but size variation from 70 to 100 is a lot less than 20 to 100.

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then I guess you need to start a new forum for Wanaho machines :) because they sound nothing like the Flashforge (not the old ones anyway) Temperature variation in the vertical plane Stays fairly consitent. I measure the temp from base to tip usually with a $2000 laser thermoscanner ( that I 'borrowed' from work, sadly the closed down and I couldn't return it.. ahem.. anyway.. )

In the flashforge, I measure the base print temp, which of course is around 110c or whatever im printing at. The top layers I check ( low enough that the residual heat from the nozzle doesnt get in the way) and they are sitting comfortablly at around 90c to 100c, so for me that is sufficient heat travel in this machine to keep the vertical rigidity throughout the print.

All these newer machines have alot more issues than I ever had to be honest! :)

Are you saying that on a vertical 14cm model while it is printing the top layer your printer will have a temperature of 90 to 100 at 7cm? That is a shock to me, how the heck is it maintaining that temperature, mine would be nowhere near that.

How does yours do for accuracy, how big and consistent will a 3 mm hole be when your printed item is at room temperature?

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Originally Posted by Mjolinor

Are you saying that on a vertical 14cm model while it is printing the top layer your printer will have a temperature of 90 to 100 at 7cm? That is a shock to me, how the heck is it maintaining that temperature, mine would be nowhere near that.

How does yours do for accuracy, how big and consistent will a 3 mm hole be when your printed item is at room temperature?

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gee, and I though that was just normal. I turn off the cooling fans too at about 3/4 of the build height, so that might also help it a bit. My heatbed has pretty good transference, it seems to be equally hot in all areas of the plate.

The room temperature for me doesn't matter, cold wind from outside sure, but I print when it's 5 degrees C at 5am or I print at 30c.. I don't notice a difference sorry.

I just use the same old pre-printing steps that I awlays do. I preheat my machine to several degrees hotter than I need, so for a 110c bed I preheat to 112, for a 230 nozzle i preheat to 235c. I preheat and let it sit there for about 5-10 mins, or until the preheat script idles out and it returns to cooling down. I then run preheat again, which of course takes only a minute and then let it sit another couple minutes. By now everything it toasty and ready to go.

I also use 1 layer of Kapton tape with 1 layer of 3M blue painters over the top of that. This small bit of insulation I find retains the heat in the bed when it fluctuates from breezes.

On my printer with the heated chamber off printing a 50 X 10 X 10 column, while printing the top layer I have 79 degrees C at layer 5, 65 at 25 mm and 90 on the 5th layer from the top. If I could get the same temperatures as you then I am sure prints would be straighter as indeed they are when I turn on my heated chamber.

It really just must be the enviroment then, because I can't say I am doing anything particularly special, the only thing that I do that's not normal is levelling the build plate while it's printing, something I don't suggest because it can be ugly if you do it wrong, but all I do is print a 5x5cm square about 1cm high, and I watch the first two layers, if the lines on each layer are spread apart with any gaps between them at all, we're too far from the platform, If they are way too flat and the nozzle drags through it, we're too close .. so I watch the layers and see which corner of the bed needs adjusting on that test run, then usually the next print is fine. But as I said, i do it while the print is happening, both dangerous to hands if the hotbed descends for whatever reason suddenly on you or you bump the plate with the nozzle, I just watch carefully when I do it and be patient.