Thin wall test turns to tangled mess

I'm trying to calibrate my printer using a 0.5mm thin wall (from here). When printing, the first few layers go great, but then it seems like the nozzle gets up too high and somewhere along the line the plastic doesn't hit the layer it needs to adhere too, turning it into a tangled birds nest of plastic.

Some specs:

Prusa Mendel
Mix G1 Extruder
1.75mm PLA
0.3mm Nozzle

0.4mm layer height
190°C
55°C heated bed with glass and blue tape

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!

BAM! Your layer height is too high!

Been discussing this at length the past week and your layer height absolutely cannot exceed your nozzle diameter... For a .3 nozzle try .2 layer height and see what results you can obtain there!

I'm a n00b so, I hope someone can back me up on this! But I really think that'll be your main issue!

Best of luck!

JazzyB

I came to the same conclusion.

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You are correct, changing my layer height to 0.2mm fixed the issue completely!

Thanks!!

This is interesting...

On my Mendel the default settings are a layer height of 0.4mm but its a 0.3mm nozzle diameter.

I tried reducing the layer height but things got messy... I'll try again though.

Anyone got any good advice on where to find good starting point settings? It feels like there are soooooo many settings in Skeinforge, the help is OK but not great and its hard to know where to start to fix problems.

skyte Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> This is interesting...
>
> On my Mendel the default settings are a layer
> height of 0.4mm but its a 0.3mm nozzle diameter.
>
> I tried reducing the layer height but things got
> messy... I'll try again though.
>
> Anyone got any good advice on where to find good
> starting point settings? It feels like there are
> soooooo many settings in Skeinforge, the help is
> OK but not great and its hard to know where to
> start to fix problems.

If you want to use Skeinforge, I'd go and download Cura, it's a pretty front end to Skeinforge50, with many of the superfluous settings taken away, and much more reasonable default values.
I'd also recommend KISSlicer which is my current favorite slicer.

Or if you're hellbent on skeinforge, turn off all the plugins except the necessary ones (carve, inset, speed, I think that's all?) And get ok prints with those - then you might think "hey there's a bit of extra plastic where it starts / ends loops" - so you read up on the clip plugin and calibrate that next... And so on, until you have much better looking prints! I found I had too much turned on to start off with and they all mess with each other so I turned em all off and added as I found out what they did and realised which ones I wanted!

I like having the million and one options that skeinforge offers but it's badly worded, that's for sure!