New Owner observations and question

This is my first post to the forum, and I thought that I would offer up my experience and tips thus far. I am on my second week with a FF Creator Pro and so far I must say that I am very pleased with the machine. After playing with it and doing some test prints, I ran into a few issues that might help out other new users.

1. LEVEL THE BED - I don't think this can be stressed enough. When I initially got my printer I unboxed it, assembled and did some testing on our dining room table. All worked well, but the Mrs. finally told me that it wasn't going to live on our dining room table. I moved it to a spot in my hobby room and didn't bother leveling again. Big mistake. I ran into an issue of the left extruder failing at the start of the print. Re-leveling the print bed solved the problem for me.

2. FIND AND LEARN TO USE OTHER SOFTWARE - The printer came with FlashPrint which is alright software, but lacks some of the "tweaking" capabilities available in other packages. I personally am a Linux user and a huge fan of Open Source software. So far ReplicatorG has been working well for me. There are other options that I haven't tested yet, but it's a huge "step up" from the default software.

3. PLAY WITH THE VARIOUS SETTINGS - Using one of the stickies at the top of this forum as a guide, I adjusted the default parameters and have gotten some good results.

4. DOWNLOAD AND READ THE SWORDFISH MANUAL (sticky at the top of the forum). There is some very good information in there, and I do recommend doing the calibration procedure as the manual says.

Regarding my last tip, that leads me to my question. In the manual, it says to measure the material that you are using (in my case ABS) and input that into the software settings. However, I have seen 2 different places to do this. First, if you go under GCode>Edit Slicing Profiles under the diameter button there is a setting for filament diameter. Also, if you click Generate GCode the window that pops up under the Plastic tab there is also a place to enter the filament diameter. I guess I'm wondering if one setting "over-rides" the other and if so, which is the proper place to input the setting?

you think rep g is an i mprovement on anything ?

Wow ! flashprint must be truly bloody awful !

I don't think I actually got to the point of running a print in rep g. After 3 hours it was still only half way through slicing a lefab shop articulated elephant.

Makerware desktop did it in about 3 minutes. Simplify3d does it in about 10 seconds.

Makerware is much better than rep g.

Simplify3d is worth the money, but you can get by perfectly well with makerware. I also prefer to edit the custom profiles in makerware in notepad - the program you can get that does it for you, just caused me extra hassle.

As far as your question goes, I've never bothered to measure filament and it's never been an issue.
But both makerware and s3d have clear places to put the measurements - I have no idea what repg does. and I'm happy to say I never will :-)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by curious aardvark

you think rep g is an i mprovement on anything ?

Wow ! flashprint must be truly bloody awful !

I don't think I actually got to the point of running a print in rep g. After 3 hours it was still only half way through slicing a lefab shop articulated elephant.

Makerware desktop did it in about 3 minutes. Simplify3d does it in about 10 seconds.

Makerware is much better than rep g.

Simplify3d is worth the money, but you can get by perfectly well with makerware. I also prefer to edit the custom profiles in makerware in notepad - the program you can get that does it for you, just caused me extra hassle.

As far as your question goes, I've never bothered to measure filament and it's never been an issue.
But both makerware and s3d have clear places to put the measurements - I have no idea what repg does. and I'm happy to say I never will :-)

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Flashprint is basically the makerware source code with a slightly different UI, but it is the same program - they didn't even move the button positions.

I am liking S3D more these days as I use it for my large format machine, but it still is not as good a slicer as makerware. I recently did a job for a client where the only program that would slice the text on this medallion I was doing was makerware - S3D deemed it too thin and omitted parts of the mesh, yet makerware sliced and printed them with ease.

Also its sailfish. But yeah, its a good machine. Enjoy.

yeah s3d can have occasional issues with really thin walls.
That said it sliced my really tiny parts for the micro rc models without any problems.

But yep it does have strange issues with text. The weird sort of doppler effect you get on the surface either side of text is just odd.
And it won't do dual printing properly. For that I still haven't found any alternative to makerware.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sebastian Finke

Also its sailfish. But yeah, its a good machine. Enjoy.

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LOL, I don't know why I called it swordfish.