some pics of Ormerod prints

extruder too hot (200deg) and printing too fast:


printing from computer (too fast, not nice) or from SD card (slower, nicer) - same .g file in both cases:


half way through a coat hook:


bed compensation messed up (X offset by 20mm - G1 X20 followed by G92 X0):


12hrs print (not spotless but good enough - required some support structure in slic3r) - please don't ask what it is:



bed not clean and slight damage to kapton caused past to fall over (twice):


2 perimeter layers in slic3r resulted in parts not that good and not that strong (not enough room to infill) - 1 perimeter was better / infill made part strong:


hope this helps

Edited 14 time(s). Last edit at 12/24/2013 06:01AM by arnaud31.

Thanks! What slick3r parameters do you recommend then?

default settings from ormerod.ini apart from the following:

layer height:
0.24 to 0.3 (I increase the layer height for large parts otherwise it takes too long);

first layer: 100%;

vertical shell perimeter:
1 minimum (instead of 2 or 3 default) seems to work better for small parts (when there isn't much room to infill) and may work fine on larger parts. I suspect multiple perimeters delay the print because the speed for the perimeter is slower than that of the infill. There may however be a good reason for multiple perimeters but I do not have enough experience of slicer3r and 3d printing in general;

horizontal shell: have been using 4 layers but the default 3 layers is probably sufficient;

infill:
0.2 on very large parts (to reduce print duration) and 0.4 on everything else;
honeycomb is good structurally for infill but I prefer rectilinear for top and bottom;

support material:
have enabled it but I don't know yet if slicer goes other the top with it or if it is all justified. Support material detaches easily from print but surface finish is awful underneath and I am yet to find a way to finish parts nicely. At time I have printed parts with some support but it looked like to could have been ok without. Need to experiment more... Pattern and spacing depends on part. As soon as my board is fixed (broken usd socket and can't get LAN to work) I am due to print a very large part (just fits on the bed) that is suppose to take about 30hrs to print. So have used 5mm spacing and rectilinear grid for support to save time but don't know if it will be a success.

extruder temp: 190deg for first layer and 185 for the rest / bed at 60deg;

cooling: settings seem to have no effect, for example fan speed does not seem to vary and is impossible to stop even when extruder is off;

firmware: uses relative E distance; this was un-ticked at first and got some funny g-codes generated. Extruder would randomly reverse by a very large amount on a regular basis during prints causing them to fail. With this option ticked I have not had any problem since. May be a coincidence though.

general g-code: have remove any reference to homing (G28) and would home manually before each print, as it was messing everything up (although I have now realised that my X-axis was wired the wrong way around);

Thanks for Slic3r parameters you used, especially "relative E" check box as I had issue with my first attempt trying to print the whole thing with the same 3cm of filament! Just kept doing big reverses.
I could see most of your pictures for some reason, so will try again later.

A question on 3D printing, but using the snowman and coat hook as examples, how do you tell Slic3r to produce a continuous layer for the bottom and top layers? I presume that as printed this is the outer walls and an infill all the way through?

So I'm guessing that you have to set say infill to 100% on these layers?

sorry about the pics, don't really know how to do this. I setup an account with photobucket but must be doing somersaulting wrong. Some pics seem to randomly disappear. Will try again later but if someone can think of a better way to share pics please let me know.

Re. top and bottom layers I am a bit disappointed and I hope it is just because I am not using slice3r properly. My understanding is that they are the horizontal shells (top and bottom, set to 3). They are said to be solid in slic3r so I fear it is the best we can expect (as per the coat hook pic for example). Compared with the beautiful finish of the vertical shells it is disappointing that the same can't be achieved horizontally. I don't in fact understand why is can't be done better. I hope I am doing something wrong...

edit: i can't print at the moment but you may want to have a play with the settings in the "advanced" tab of the "print settings", the answer to a nice smooth finish at the top may be with the extrusion width parameters. Most are set to 0 as a default but some of mine seem to be set to 1mm (might I fiddled with it without realising).

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/24/2013 06:30AM by arnaud31.

I forgot to mention that I also changed the skirt settings, increasing it to 2 and moving it a little further away from the part (12mm).
I find it gives the extruder more time to get going properly. The reason I have moved the skirt further away from the part is because sometime the skirt doesn't stick to the bed very well - it is the first payer and the bed is inevitably not perfectly compensated. Being further when the skirt sometimes detaches it doesn't end up stuck to the part itself.