Translate

Tuesday 2 June 2015

Trials and Tribulations

So deciding to finish my shapeoko of ve been trying to print some cable chains and here are the picture of the selection I printed. I wanted big ones but the time it takes to print them was also a factor in which ones I eventually print. Some failures down to print errors mainly due to how filament was feeding of the spool. I have now decided that from now on I am going to buy the filament on the larger reels, the white ones seems that the filament is wound too tight so it doesn't freely come of when the less material on the spool.


Also I have been trying to do lithopanes of my grandson Evan Andrew Summerfield who passed away in march, these are very tricky to do but did a couple, didn't come out that brilliant but not to bad for the quality of printing I was getting on other parts.


As I have started using hairspray which works a treat getting 1st layer down so the 1st layer issue has gone, getting my head around cura and speeds is really getting the hang of it and now cura is always used over Slic3r, just the filament feed issue I have, so I decided to experiment in having the the pla cut into shorter piece so it was more freely to get fed in machine instead of having it coming of a spool, but the first item I started printing I was thinking I did not have enough filament to finish the object, so this is the time to see if I can change filament colour, so I hit filament change on the lcd then it finished and homed to change filament which went surprisingly easy with the flex3drive and started printing again, It went quite well but forgot to adjust the idle screw so 1st layer of new colour did not fully extruded but went ok but eventually failed further up to a layer alignment issue. so aborted print. but i thought id do the same on a vase change colour which went really well.






There was some filament feed issues as you see on some of the light blue areas, but now it bewilders me why on such a big object I 90% good quality and without a cancel print but on smaller multiple part prints about 60% quality. I would be happy if i was getting same quality on parts for shapeoko as the quality of the two colour vase people may think that that broken layer is bad, but I am not looking top notch visual quality but functionable quality for mechanical parts.