i3v Cura settings

[printbus]

... I'm curious how has your retraction_minimal_extrusion and retraction_min_travel settings worked out for you?

As mentioned elsewhere, I haven't used Cura for the last 8 months. IIRC, the values mentioned were good starting points. What I can say is that I grew to feel that retraction is part of the settings that are possibly best tweaked for each print, trading off print quality and the risk of print failure due to the hobbed bolt chewing into the filament. Before starting a print, I'd often view the gcode result layer by layer in gcode.ws, looking to see what the gcode was doing as far as print speeds, travel speeds, how often the gcode was switching between print and travel moves, and how many of those transitions would involve a retraction. I'd then readjust settings to resolve anything I didn't like in the gcode result, and slice the part again. Deciding what to change just came with experience.

I'll also add that I learned a lot about slicer settings in experimenting with how to improve my print results for thread MakerFarm benchmark results with Make: 2015 Shoot Out test models. Experimenting is a powerful way to learn.

[printbus]

The project box was in PLA, but I've had similar problems in both PLA and ABS. I had already learned to turn off retraction if there are lot of very short segments (legs, posts, etc.) involved in a print, but the corner-to-corner travel on that box had me fooled. I edited the post to explain how I had travel and printing both set to 100mm/sec, so I didn't realize that some of the movements were just travel (why didn't I look at the extruder gear??). That box was probably on my "worst" spool of PLA for this. It is softer and more pliable than my other PLA and ABS, and it's undersized in diameter. Variables like that are probably more significant than PLA vs ABS.