Hoping someone has an idea on this!
I’ve been making little Disney trinkets for my wife to hand out when we go to Disneyland, and feedback has been positive enough that I thought I’d try a little Etsy store to make some filament money.
Initially I added it into my base template in TinkerCAD but it kept coming out real bad, so I’ve been trying adding the text within Creality Print, and usually it looks pretty good but it can be wildly inconsistent.
The top two are from a batch of five where I set one up and then duplicated it. The middle two are from a batch of eleven, all duplicated from the first five that looked nice, and then the bottom two are that same batch of five that I tried printing a second time and it turned out way worse.
Any idea on why it varies so much and what I could do to resolve it?
I don’t think your issue is the text, it’s your first layer. A number of these prints have pretty significant gaps between the extrusions.
Do you have auto leveling?
Do different prints from “the same batch” look different from one another? If yes, your bed is likely not level.
Do different prints, from the same location, look different between print jobs? If yes, it’s likely that something is loose.
I’ve had the best experience flipping the print and printing text on top. If it has to be on the bottom though, slowing the print speed and using a slicer with bridging settings may work better.
Your first layer seems inconsistent. What z sensor are you using? Were these printed in quick succession or did the printer have time to cool?
My thinking is this could be due to thermal drift in your homing sensor. First print will be solid, then subsequent prints will have a warmed up sensor resulting in a different z offset. Try minimizing variables by making your preheating consistent. Or just baby step the z-axis during the print start.
Back to back prints so that may play into it, good point! Haven’t used it for a day so I’m kicking off a calibration and then printing a five batch to see how that looks.
For consistent preheating are you meaning like preheat the bed and hot end and then run the calibration? I just moved to a K1 Max from a CR-10 that I paper leveled so I’m very new to auto leveling and tricks for that. Thank you for the feedback!
Let’s hope the ones you’re trying to sell on Etsy don’t have this same issue 😜
I’m only adding this because I don’t already see someone mentioning it.
My first thought was bed leveling, because that’s always the first thing, especially with weird surface artifacts.
But looking at the bridging “above” the text and the gaps in the interface between the solid infill and your perimeters I suspect that you’ve got some under-extrusion going on.
Have you tuned your filament? If not I recommend giving that a shot and seeing if it doesn’t clear up those issues.
ETA: I’ve also found that with text printed on the base I have way better luck when I cut it about 1mm deep (for 0.2mm layer heights)
Do you have any recommendations for tuning filament? I’ve found a few videos I’m going to watch tonight, but one thing that’s interesting is I just switched from a CR-10 to a K1 Max, and at the same time from Simplify3D to Creality Print and checking my old S3D profile, my flow modifier was at 1.0, but on CPrint it’s at 0.95. That seems weird, but also it’s manufacturer software with their printer so I’d assume they know what they’re doing, but then it gives weird prints like this.
I’m excited to introduce you to this if you haven’t seen it!
https://teachingtechyt.github.io/calibration.html
I use this as a general guide for every time I buy a new material, manufacturer, and/or color of filament. There’s YouTube videos explaining everything every step of the way.
For a new printer (or significant modifications) I’d go through the whole thing. For new filament, if I haven’t used it before, I do flow calibration, temperature tuning, retraction tuning, pressure/linear advance tuning, and max flow tuning, not necessarily in that order. I’ve found that as I’ve learned and experimented more I’ve branched out into more esoteric tools for some things.
My filament printer is a fairly heavily modified ender 3 pro (spider hotend, direct drive, dual z axis, spring steel bed, solid bed spacers, herome gen 7 cooler, cr touch, stepper driver diodes, and an adxl345 waiting for me to mount and wire it… I think that’s it). So I’m not saying this as a Creality hater, I love my ender, I hate their software and firmware. I had a terrible time with their Marlin firmware and ended up building it myself. I’ve since switched to klipper though and highly recommend it, it got me a reasonable quality benchy in around 30 minutes.
My point there is that I have had a hard time with the default profiles across the board, even before the mods. For filament printing I use Prusaslicer, though I do like Superslicer and Orcaslicer seems nice as well, I just have all my profiles built for Prusaslicer and it generally just works.
