Topic: Guide to printing PLA on a Solidoodle
Maybe you found this thread and hope to find an actual guide to printing in PLA like the title says. I was hoping to find one too. But I've just spent an hour doing searches and reading dozens of threads and wiki pages and other sources, and I couldn't get a clear idea of how to print PLA on the Solidoodle, though it's clear a number of people are doing it. So I'm starting this thread to try to gather the information that's available from those who know. If people use this thread to post some good input, I will edit this top post into the actual guide that the topic promises.
Here's what I found in the last few hours of researching:
An extruder temperature of 180 is most commonly recommended. But there are references to using other temperatures in some situations or with some filaments, but no guidance I could find about when you'd use a different temperature.
The bed should be glass. No, it should be blue painter's tape. No, it should be kapton. No, it should be masking tape. I found a lot of recommendations but none seemed to get the vote more than any other.
The bed should either not be heated (for instance, see here and here), or it should be heated to 85 (for instance, see here). Quite a range of difference of temperature between those two extremes.
I saw a number of references to using an extra fan mounted in the case or on the extruder to cool the print, but every reference I found was referring to something else not still present, or just assuming you already knew about it. No certainty about whether this is a necessity for all PLA prints, or just for bigger or more complex ones, or what.
I found no guidance about any Slic3r settings you might want to change (other than temperatures as noted above).
If you have expertise to share, please do so. If we can get consensus, I'd like to record it here; and if we don't, at least we'll have the arguments for each side of each issue.
(By the way, this is what I want to print in PLA, since the nice dark green filament I got that's the right color for it is PLA, something I didn't realize until it arrived. Hopefully this is a pretty simple print and thus a good one to cut my PLA teeth on.)