new printer, made a few prints one messed up bad. Trying to learn, some questions...

[Alibert]

The 10% infill is getting you where you need to be. I would still lower the temperature to 180-190 C though.

With the 100% infill you see that too much plastic is being extruded, at 100% infill it simply has no other place to go but sideways or up. At 10%, the plastic can go sideways into the empty space....

My guess is that your slicer has a multiplier on the infill. That means that it extrudes more plastic than required in order to make stronger hatching. Have a look at the infill settings and see if you can find something.

And again: lower temperatures, lower temperatures (for PLA that is, not ABS which needs 225-235) ......

With halving the speeds I mean the extruding things, Travel speeds are OK as they were.

The feedstockmultiplier is (I think?) a setting in the menu's of your printer which are available when you are printing, and yes they do increase/reduce the amount of plastic being extruded and override the slicer settings on the run. This is usefull for fine-tuning as you can change this on the fly.

Whether or not S3D is a personal choice. Many people are perfectly happy with Makerware, Cura, etc. My experience is that S3D (apart from the pre-built profiles) is fast, accurate and handles a lot of the settings a lot more intelligently than the free slicers. Given a pre-built profile, you still have loads of fine-tweaking posibilities which are very powerful, and control of supports is excellent. What I love most is the capability of loading multiple objects and applying different profiles to them (for example one part at 100% infill, the others at 30%, or slower speeds for a part that needs finer details, etc) so that I can print a project in whole at once. By saving the 'factory file' (a S3D thing), I build an archive of ready-to-print projects.

I have no ties with the makers of S3D whatever, it just is a cracking good piece of software and I am just one of the many users. Also the online support guides are good: https://www.simplify3d.com/support/ As to the problems you are facing, have a read here: https://www.simplify3d.com/support/p...oubleshooting/

As time is money, I have got a really good return on my $150 investment so to speak. But again, the choice is yours. Don't blame me if you purchase and afterwards feel it is not worth it.

[codejoy]

Actually I just did another print and did lower the temperatures...It is a pretty decent looking cube finally. That was at 195c. The top is still rough and the layers near the top seem to bulge and get wonky, this I think you answered with the infill question and I think maybe my infill layer height (in the makerweare) is separate from actual layer height? not sure...I set it to the .3mm in the infill section of the makerware, then just now realized that there is a seperate layerheight I had set at .2mm sure that didn't help things. The infill question though confuses me, as the sailfish manual suggests the testing at 100% infill, but at the 10% it seems more tolerant and your comment makes more sense to me. The only thing I really did here was change the filament diameter and print temp and print speed (does that really matter that much, seems after reading cheap filament can really change over the length of it anyway by decent amounts). The filament diameter I did change again on this second print, I took a second measurement using the calipers and lowered the temps and this is the 100% infill at 195c with the filament set to 1.69mm. Kept the speeds slow...


That simply3d does sound nice with the ability to change settings as to the different parts of the model. I will check the guides and keep printing the cube...then maybe go back to not the complex vault boy but the nice catan tile for a test:

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:26979

those were close out of the box anyway (guessing cause they aren't to high) and really I just had the shell issues I think. I think I am almost there, thanks everyone. There is a lot going on here and learning the process is time consuming.P1060962.jpg

[codejoy]

So this is with the 10% infill, that top gap no idea whats causing it, bigger than the last time I tried with the diff diameter and temp. looks almost like an air bubble/pocket burst... I am not even sure if that is the thing. But this is a pretty nice cube on all sides and not convex or concave on top. Just really that tiny hole ...and maybe that each of the corners have a little point to them...other than that is looks good.

P1060963.jpg

[codejoy]

I also couldn't resist I printed the vault boy one more time and it came out pretty good!! though its like a few of the layers got off balance or something (detailed in picture) other than that (in pla) it turned out okay. Slowing it down and doing things I think really helped. I also printed a bunch of meeples (from a board game) and used that as a test cube as well ....figured out that increasing the roof and floor in makeware, and sorta fudging the filament numbers to fix under-extrusion made for some pretty good looking items. I will try the vault boy again later with a layerheight of .3 instead of .2 to just see if it fixes anything, that one still puzzles me, but as someone said maybe in ABS i'd have more luck.P1060967.jpg

P1060968.jpg

[Alibert]

If you have overhangs it helps to decrease the layer height instead of increasing it. That way you can get away with larger angles and have less risk of the outer shell not 'catching' to the inner ones.

layers.jpg

And yes, give ABS a try....

[codejoy]

I thought layerheights were limited by my nozzle, and I couldn't go past .2mm, so if i get those overhangs with .2mm guessing my printer won't do .1mm as a decreases. I did print some other models yesterday they turned out pretty good...had a friend look he thought maybe a deskfan would also help too as you suggested earlier (still finding one) since the platform raises not sure which one to get that would be able to hit the plastic as its extruding.