Wanhao Duplicator 3

[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?

[Geoff]

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?

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.

[Mjolinor]

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.

[Geoff]

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.