Problem with layer adhesion (I think) (Page 1 of 2)

Do you have retract on? I tend to prefer the results with retract for when I'm using PLA, because PLA oozes more.

I'm not sure what is considered wiggle so here's a video of my extruder. There's definitely some play there.

I calibrated the extruder, as far as I can tell it pulls in exactly 100mm of filament when I tell it to pull in 100mm. I'll turn off randomizing starting points and see if that helps.

Yes retract is on.
Retract length: 2.5
Speed: 50
Extra length on restart: .3
Minimum travel after retraction: 1
Wipe before retract: ON

That makes sense, I was running it at 205 to start and 200 the rest of the layers, I'll give it a shot at... 190 for first layer and 180 the rest?

I usually have the metal enclosure on to keep things warm inside, just took it off for the quick video.

Any ideas on the little separations between the layers? I thought it wasn't hot enough, therefore not adhering together...

Humm, adhesion is bonding two things together.
Cohesion is making two things into one single thing.
If I'm not mistaken.

As a little update, I lowered the temp to 190 on first layer and 180 on the rest. Then I started to print the same piece as in the original picture but there were obvious problems.

The filament must have gotten caught at some point as the bottom few layers are off set from the rest.
Other than that though, it seems like it just isn't extruding enough material? If I turn the flow rate up any more I won't have accurate line widths. i.e. I've already calibrated for .42 extrusion width by following solidoodles instructions. (http://wiki.solidoodle.com/flow-rate)

I then tried to print a 50mm cylinder, which seemed to print fine but when I went to pull it off the board it split along one of the layers...

Here are some more pictures of the cylinder.

The top of the cylinder was poorly done as you can see. I easly took my finger nail and pulled the top couple of layers off. In fact I could basically peel apart individual layers with my fingernails. I'm uploading some video to YouTube and I'll add it here in a few minutes.

This is a video of the print at the top of the post.

Here's a video of me pulling apart the layers of the cylinder.

I tend to agree with you on the extrusion.I have everything calibrated for .3 layer height,extrusion,flow rate,etc.

I recently printed out the same MK5 at .3 layer height and 50% infill and ended up with some fine looking prints.

I thought I'd experiment with .1 layer height to see if I could improve the result,I started with the tension arm.The only thing I did to start with was go from .3 to .1 in slic3r and hit "print".

My results were less than perfect.The tension arm printed at .3 looked as good as you could want.The arm printed at .1 had the exact same blobs on the corners as gettingbored is getting.That leads me to believe it's an extrusion problem.

I wasn't about to re-calibrate for .1 when I already had a good set on MK5 prints at .3 so I stopped there.

I've also experimented with turning of "randomize starting points" on various prints.It might not make a difference when printing out a MK5 but if you do so on a taller print such as a vase,you will end up with what looks like a seam that runs the height of the print.

@gettingbored: Do you have another filament you can try? Did you have the same layer seperation issues at 205C? 180 might be a bit on the low side. 190-195 always seem to be the sweet spot for me.

The picture that shows the small layer shift and the extrusion problems. -> Did you notice the extruder skipping? or see if the filament was having trouble feeding? That also might be from the temps being a little low.

on a side note: Looks like you don't have any banding issues! Nice job.

Must have missed it, but I answered the extruder calibration question in post #5, I tell it to pull in 100mm and it pulls in exactly 100mm. I followed the instructions from Solidoodle.

Yes the first layer is pretty pressed into the bed, but it tends to not stick if I don't extrude that low. Maybe it's worth looking into a glass bed and some hair spray or something. I'm not exactly sure how the first layer could effect every other layer above it in the way my print is effected, but I'll try backing off on the first layer a bit.

After I calibrated my extruder, I did print the single walled cube to calibrate line thickness, but the only way I could get accurate line thickness was by bringing the flow rate down to .8 which basically resulted in the gaps appearing between layers.

I have the line width set to .42 and I believe I have a .35mm nozzle. Is there a reliable way to tell?

Yeah there are still some separation issues with the higher temps, the pictures in the first post are with higher temps and you can definitely see those little gaps all over the place.

I tried to print some more with the lower temps and the extruder started skipping, which made me think the temps were too low at 180. I'll try going to 195 first layer and 190 for the rest to see how that works.

Do you have a recommended place to buy filament from, or one that you know ships consistent stuff? If I know a reliable distributor I'd like to get something that would be more "standard" so to speak, that way I can eliminate that variable.

Yeah getting rid of those banding issues was a huge relief, was probably the most annoying problem with the printer ever since nothing but swapping the threaded rod fixed it. Now I have 2.7 meters of M3 threaded rod I'll have to find an interesting use for.

I did have a major problem with clogging a while back, and ended up taking apart the entire hot end and cleaning it out by soaking it in acetone and basically scraping it out. I thought I got it pretty much fully cleaned out though but maybe there's some remnant left in there that's causing problems.

Do you have any tips on extruding the single strands? My filament tends to curl up in a ball when it's extruded.

That. Right there. You have .42 for width manually set (a good thing) and if you set your nozzle for .35 when its actually .4, you will get exactly what you have been seeing.

Also, I would still like to know what you set your Z steps/mm after switching your rod out. The wrong setting would mean the Z stepper could be dropping more than 0.3mm each layer (which would also possibly be the problem).

Assuming the nozzle starts clean (i.e. there isn't a bit of leftover extrusion sticking to the nozzle or something like that) curling extrusion like you describe tends to indicate a clog in the nozzle. I went through fairly similar issues with my stock SD2 hot end until I finally gave up and bought an E3D to replace it, because I just couldn't print anything with my stock hot end anymore. Luckily yours doesn't seem to be in as bad of shape as mine, though.

One thing, looking at the difference between the MK5 print and the cylinder print, I think at least part of your issue has to do with retraction settings. Try printing the 0.5mm-thin-wall.stl from this calibration set: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5573/.

With a single-wall print like that you'll be able to see exactly where the layers change and, with that, see the effects of your retraction settings. If you end up with little gaps in the wall after each layer height change you know your retraction setting is a bit high.

Is there a serial number or version number on the system somewhere that might correspond to the time it was made? Not sure if the time we got it in the office it was new or not.

Also,
Did anybody see the video of the extruder play? Does it seem normal to rock a little bit like that or is that more play than there should be?

Actually the play does seem to come from between the carriage and the rods. Like there's a .1mm gap between those white plastic bushings(?) and the rod. Not sure how much of a problem that would cause, but I'm not sure how I would fix it. Is there a way to snug up the bushings?

I looked on the back of the machine and saw on the board it reads "Sanguinololu Rev 1.3a" but on the chip on the board it reads "Solidoodle Rev 1.3c" so I'm not sure which nozzle my printer would have... By default it was set to .35 but maybe it's a .4 nozzle. Either way my extrusion width is set to .42 so maybe I could just try changing it to .4 and see what happens...