Another newbie's Smarcore build

I like the ptfe liners. It's what makes cheap Chinese hot ends function. Lol. If your only doing ABS or PLA then get a nozzle with a liner.

I have a heat break with the liner. I'll consider switching back to that as "plan B" For now, I'm trying to get this to work. I know others have succeeded and I'd like to figure out how. On the theory that the first layer was too low and the back-pressure was forcing the molten pla up into the heat break (which definitely seems to be happening) I increased the first layer height to .4mm. I also tried the "drop of oil" on the end of the filament. End result was 2D print number 4. I'm now tinkering with the print speed. The ability to adjust the filament feed rate seems to be surprisingly limited as I did not find an option for it in Marlin or Slic3r.

I decided to switch plans and revert back to the ptfe lined heat break. Made all of the difference. In hindsight, it would appear that the cooling just wasn't sufficient to keep the heat from traveling up into the heat break and melting the pla.

So, first 3D print ever:



It looks much better in person but obviously quite a bit of room for improvement. At least now I'm 3D printing!

@MichaelBrock Hooray! Congratulations. If you are looking to calibrate your extruder (which I highly recommend as an almost essential activity) then you will want to look to adjust the last value in the brackets of this line of configuration.h in your Marlin folder:

#define DEFAULT_AXIS_STEPS_PER_UNIT   {80,80,1600,145}

RichRap gives a really good guide to calibrating extruder here:
RichRap Slic3r setup and extruder calibration

Congrats on your first 3d print... now to tuning!

congrats ! welcome in the world of never finished learning new adjustments for printing
it sounds a little anoying said like this , but really it is passionating !
you will see that after some time, you can still spend some time to fine tune prints, but when you want actually print something useful, it will just work ! that's the good part of it

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the Smartrap project

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I figured out the issue I was having with the z-axis offset. I would set it and it would always re-set itself to 1. I thought I might have accidentally stored it in EEPROM as one but once I got a handle on storing values in the eeprom I realized that was not the case. The problem started when I loaded the slic3r configuration from SmartFriendz' SmartCore files but I didn't make the connection until this morning. The start code there has a G851 Z-1 in it! Problem solved.

I am generally happy with my prints now. Still need to tweak the bottom layer a bit and getting some skipping (not obvious during printing but showing up in the prints themselves). One odd puzzling thing I can't find any mention of is that my printer always mars the top of the test cube, just as it's finishing the print. You can see it in the top right corner of the top surface in the image blow. It almost looks like my printer has decided to autograph it's piece of work! Is it maybe pushing around a glob of pla that gets left behind when it's done?

I have tweaked things up (both the print settings and the hardware) a bit and am getting prints as good as I might have hoped for. Last night I printed a tablet stand, just about the largest thing I have printed to date. It started very well but when I checked on it this morning I have this:




I am printing Inland gray PLA at 190 w/ a first layer at 195. .4mm nozzle, with .2 mm layers, and .2mm first layer. Is this caused by too low nozzle temperature? It otherwise is very solid and my last 1/2 dozen or so prints were at these same temperatures without any issues. Maybe bad filament?

The other problem is that this thing stuck to the glass bed with cheap glue stick so well that I broke the glass trying to get it off!