Yes, the fan duct mod helps too, if you adjust it right. You also need to print it in right angle to achieve best strength.

carl_m1968 wrote:

david.tucker wrote:

I managed to get better looking prints, but it took some real effort, there is no magic bullet here.  The best part is you can tweak settings you could not previously.  For example I have reduced my oozing issues by quite a lot, although I suspect a better hot end would fix the issue permanently.

The real reason I'm digging into Cura is that I have poor dimensional accuracy with XYZWare, the perimeters are fine but internal dimensions are all off.  If your just interested in printing figurines then the advantages are not as apparent.

Just so you know, when you make a design you have to allow for shrinkage. As the print cools it will shrink by as much as 20% depending on the filament. It is different per spool. What I do is when I load a new spool I print a cal cube. Then I know the exact shrinkage I am looking at for that spool when I make a model in cad and I can allow for that in my dimensions so the final print is accurate.

This was a slicer issue.  I could print a cube with a square hole in it and get reasonable accuracy, at least to within a mm, but print a circle and it was off by several mm.  The worst is that a round post grew a bit and a round hole shrunk a lot (3-5 mm) making it so all my tolerances had to be large, like 7 mm to not bind up.

My interest is in mechanical design, and if I can't control accuracy at all, or have to seriously tweak my designs, then it is not worth the effort.  May as well use a different tool like a cnc.  I would be happy to be repeatably within a mm, although that seems a bit sloppy to me.

If your machine is calibrated which I can assure a stock XYZ is not then you can get down to +/- .2 on accuracy. The issue is you don't have access to the required settings needed to dial in that accuracy on a stock XYZ machine and those settings are not controlled by your slicer.

david.tucker wrote:

I managed to get better looking prints, but it took some real effort, there is no magic bullet here.  The best part is you can tweak settings you could not previously.  For example I have reduced my oozing issues by quite a lot, although I suspect a better hot end would fix the issue permanently.

The real reason I'm digging into Cura is that I have poor dimensional accuracy with XYZWare, the perimeters are fine but internal dimensions are all off.  If your just interested in printing figurines then the advantages are not as apparent.

Just so you know, when you make a design you have to allow for shrinkage. As the print cools it will shrink by as much as 20% depending on the filament. It is different per spool. What I do is when I load a new spool I print a cal cube. Then I know the exact shrinkage I am looking at for that spool when I make a model in cad and I can allow for that in my dimensions so the final print is accurate.

This was a slicer issue.  I could print a cube with a square hole in it and get reasonable accuracy, at least to within a mm, but print a circle and it was off by several mm.  The worst is that a round post grew a bit and a round hole shrunk a lot (3-5 mm) making it so all my tolerances had to be large, like 7 mm to not bind up.

My interest is in mechanical design, and if I can't control accuracy at all, or have to seriously tweak my designs, then it is not worth the effort.  May as well use a different tool like a cnc.  I would be happy to be repeatably within a mm, although that seems a bit sloppy to me.

I managed to get better looking prints, but it took some real effort, there is no magic bullet here.  The best part is you can tweak settings you could not previously.  For example I have reduced my oozing issues by quite a lot, although I suspect a better hot end would fix the issue permanently.

The real reason I'm digging into Cura is that I have poor dimensional accuracy with XYZWare, the perimeters are fine but internal dimensions are all off.  If your just interested in printing figurines then the advantages are not as apparent.

Just so you know, when you make a design you have to allow for shrinkage. As the print cools it will shrink by as much as 20% depending on the filament. It is different per spool. What I do is when I load a new spool I print a cal cube. Then I know the exact shrinkage I am looking at for that spool when I make a model in cad and I can allow for that in my dimensions so the final print is accurate.

The real reason I'm digging into Cura is that I have poor dimensional accuracy with XYZWare, the perimeters are fine but internal dimensions are all off.  If your just interested in printing figurines then the advantages are not as apparent.