Rough Surface Issues (Page 1 of 3)

adjust your extrusion multiplier in Slic3r

Some things that have effected roughness for me...

1) z height from adjustment screw. If its to low than it'll cause ridges that will propagate up to the layers above. If you have enough layers it tends to work itself out, but on thin objects it needs to be dialed in right. On the other side, if its to high you'll have gaps between infill.

2) in slic3r there is a first layer extrusion  %. This needs to be played with in conjunction with layer height to get a full first layer but not ridgey. There is also % normal infill which will effect ridges/roughness, but I find that the first layer is the key to the others.

3) surface your printing on. I was using a tile that would give me ridges in the same place every time. When switching to glass all better.

is there like a guide somewhere with pictures that explains how to tell when you need to do this stuff? I know how to set that setting in slic3r but I don't know what to look for in my prints when I would need to do that...

Hmm yeah.. Saw that but most of the problems I'm having don't have fixes on there. Like the one with the rough edges just says to adjust your slicer's settings or try a different slicer program. Wish I knew which settings to change. And the other one I * think * is my problem is the "degenerative bridging" but it says to clean out the dust from the extruder, but I don't appear to have any built up dust when I checked.

Ok I applied the flow rate calibration by printing a square empty box and measuring the wall thickness like the guide says for flow rate calibtration. I also measured my average filament width.

So in slic3r my setting in "filament" are now:

Diameter: 1.84 (averaged over 5 readings along the length of the filament)
Multiplier: 0.83 (I was getting wall widths of .50mm and .42mm was the goal)

Now with those settings I should be getting perfect prints since everything else is calibrated including z stop, levelling, PID tuning, and extruder stepping.

However now when using that flow rate I'm getting delamination between layers I didn't get before, and also gaps on the top and bottom layers. It also seems small parts (like a 4mm empty circle) aren't going correctly (it came out as a triangle and warped.)

help!

Couple of things

Then you have to adjust your multiplier lower as you are over extruding.

That's a little high usually you want 1.68 to 1.72
What are you using to measure the diameter?

Calipers, Mic?

If so what brand?

Then you have to lower the multiplier more if your still not extruding the proper amount.
Rely on the calipers not on your math as your steps per mm on the stepper could be off causing the difference
or your nozzle height from the bed is to low.

You also have filament that's over diameter so that's probably adding to the over extruding.

Plus your calipers are a cheap brand so not telling how accurate those are.

Do you have a feeler gauge or 123 block you can reference them from?

What's your retraction set to?

Also with the gaps what's the width of the cube?

I have my retraction set to the default for SD3 that they supplied on their website. I think it's 2.5mm but I'll check when I get home and post all my settings.

The gaps I'm not getting on the cube, I'm getting that on a smaller circular part I'm making. I'll post pics later when I get home.

Ok this is what I was trying to print:
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:195266

These are my results:

The little peg is supposed to be 4mm diamater. You can see it came out smaller than the hole it goes in which is also 4mm diameter. You can see also the round holes are not round and the layers are delamination and cracking. This is with fully calibrated everything... What I am trying to say is my flow rate is correct, I'm not asking how to do it, I'm saying it's calibrated. The .83 multiplyer is calibrated, it was 1.00 before and over extruding (walls were thicker than they were supposed to be.)

Here you can see when printing it also leaves things that stick up. Not sure why it does that:

Here's my current slic3r settings

And it could be just bad filament. Do you have any other rolls you could test with? But just cross off one thing at a time off the list. It takes a little bit of work to get it, but once you do it'll be all good.

I'm not mad. Thank you for the help!

Yes, here the walls are .42ish average with my multiplier set to .83 for this filament. See pics:

It seems to vary where I measure it but mostly around .42.

This is the calibrations I've done:
* Level bed with piece of thin paper (nozzle = same difference on all 3 screw points)
* Calibrated extruder steppings for it was pulling exactly 100mm .
* Calibrated true filament diameter (1.83mm average)
* Calibrated flow rate (.83 multiplier)
* Calibrated PID temps for stable temperature

I have not done all the steps you have said for calibrated I didn't realize those existed. I'll try those. Any other suggestions in the mean time?