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  1. #1
    Engineer-in-Training
    Join Date
    Sep 2014
    Location
    Brummen, Netherlands
    Posts
    265
    I am still convinced it it a cooling issue. In the vid you see the plastic bending up and down as it is still quite rubbery. This points to the fact that it doesn't cool off enough to become rigid enough to withstand the dragging force of the nozzle pulling molten plastic over it. This is most evident when the nozzle makes a curve movement.

    PLA has a very low glass point (temp where it becomes rubbery) of around 65 C. This is why when printing PLA it is usefull to have a cooling fan. Remember that the nozzle is radiating heat as well, so with a small object and the nozzle hanging over it all the time the PLA will cool slowly. A plastic like ABS has a glass point around 105 C and you never use a cooling fan there. The cooling fan is not the one you see on the front of your extruder as that one is intended to cool the heatsink and not the printed object.

    There is an easy test to see if it is the PLA cooling and that is to do the same object in ABS. Use all the same settings (and with raft), only use a nozzle temp of 230 C and a bed of 95 C. Your printer most likely came with a free spool of ABS as well? You can use the other nozzle to load the ABS.

    If the ABS also comes out wrong, then one must look elswhere such as z-axis steps/mm and extruder steps/mm. But I doubt that the problem lies there.

    If you want to stick with PLA, try printing two objects at the same time with some distance between them. Load the object twice and place them a bit apart on the bed. Then slice it. This way the nozzle will move alternatingly to both objects. This more than doubles the cooling time per layer per object, and also the nozzle is only over the object (and radiating heat to it) half of the time. It might introduce stringing between the objects though.
    Last edited by Alibert; 01-02-2016 at 04:01 PM.

  2. #2
    Student
    Join Date
    Dec 2015
    Location
    Seattle
    Posts
    38
    Alright, so heat is an issue. I intentionally spaced them semi-close to see if the shoulders that were closest would be problematic (They weren't.)
    That being said, they weren't particularly great, and I had to press the corners down as suggested by EagleSeven, but it's definite progress.
    20160103_093716.jpg20160103_093729.jpg20160103_093818.jpg20160103_093848.jpg
    For those curious: this was printed with 10% infill, .27 layer height, with a single shell. Feed 30, travel 40, temp 190.

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