I thought I had extruder problems due to getting excessive blobbing, big gaps on perimeters and bad results on supported prints. I stripped the extruder, got rid of the back lash due to an ill-fitting drive nut in the extruder gear but it had no effect on the above problems so I tried Slic3r after using Skeinforge since first building the printer.

Slic3r seems to have cured the blobbing at the start of a thread and does not leave gaps on perimeters and the supported prints are better, altough the support material is a bit harder to remove on some prints. The only issue with slic3r has been it misses out layers sometimes and seems to have more problems with the STL files (saying there are missing faces and intersecting meshes etc)

See attached photos for the difference in prints... the slic3r gear has a nut in it.

You can see an odd layer on the slic3r print just above the first layer, but apart from that its perfect. The Skeinforge print has odd loops and doesn't fill as well.

Skeinforge is printing the outside perimeters first whereas slic3r is printing the inside perimeters and spiraling outwards which avoids the gaps on the ends of the teeth. The skeinforge prints were creating the odd loops in exactly the same place everytime (I printed 3 gears on skeinforge before switching to slic3r)

It's all in the settings and printer, from my printer the print quality results are reverse of your results. I get much better results with SF. Recently using KISSlicer mostly, really good results for me.

I tried playing with the skeinforge settings but it was really hard to actually make a difference. Slic3r worked straight out of the box, so to speak.

I definitely think printing the perimeters from the inside out gives better results on things like gear teeth though.

What I want to acheive next is a second extruder printing a water soluable support material... that seems to be what the "next step up" commercial printers are doing but I don't know what the support material is!

You can change the order SF does the outlines in the Fill settings.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

Yeah I might try that now I've seen slic3r do it but it could take hours to tweak all the skeinforge settings to try and eliminate the random loops and blobs. I tried loads of settings to eliminate them and solve the problem of incomplete perimeters (see pic) but nothing seemed to make a difference so I assumed it was the backlash in the exrtruder. Slic3r does complete perimeters, minimal blobbing and great fill so i'm more inclined to move forward with slic3r than go back to skeinforge and keep trying to get it right.

The only thing I'm noticing in slic3r is the odd missing layer and it having issues with STL files that skeinforge was fine with. This is possibly due to a different layer height tho as I fixed a layer misinterpretation problem once in skeinforge by re-generating the g-code with a different layer thickness.

It just looks like the retract settings are wrong.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

skyte Wrote:
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> I tried playing with the skeinforge settings but
> it was really hard to actually make a difference.
> Slic3r worked straight out of the box, so to
> speak.
>
> I definitely think printing the perimeters from
> the inside out gives better results on things like
> gear teeth though.
>
> What I want to acheive next is a second extruder
> printing a water soluable support material... that
> seems to be what the "next step up" commercial
> printers are doing but I don't know what the
> support material is!


PVA, that's what I intend on trying when I get into dual extrusion. But I'm still some time away from that.

nophead Wrote:
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> It just looks like the retract settings are wrong.


Is that the settings in Oozebane (or Oozestep)? Which tab are the retract settings you think need changing?

The retract settings are in Dimension. I have never used Oozeband and SF50 does not have Oozestep, so I don't know what that is. Simple retraction is all I have ever needed.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

I tried Slic3r first before switching to Skeinforge. Given that I had about one year of experience with the easier Slic3r and read the Skeinforge wiki thoroughly, I was able to print a near perfect print with Skeinforge (better than my previous Slic3r prints anyway) on the first try (ok, second try if you count the cancelled first layer due to initially wrong flow rate settings).
It really comes down to tweaking the settings right because print quality deteriorated for a time when I tried and tweaked different settings until I was relatively happy with them.
So don't give up, I guess?

Latest versions of Slic3r have gotten really good at accurately filling small spaces and tight gaps. That's probably why the gear teeth look so good. I'm sure you could get at least similar quality out of Skeinforge by tuning the settings, but why bother? Are the pictured Slic3r results some sort of a problem you really want to fix?

I, at least, really don't miss things like the Clip module or the fiddling with the Infill Perimeter Overlap. The overlap settings in particular were a nasty trap for people trying to fix backlash or output volume accuracy problems by increasing the overlap instead of fixing the root cause. Slic3r expects a certain level of accuracy from the printer and if you have that, you get pretty nice results right away.

Slic3r produces poorer results for me because it does all the perimeters before any infill which makes for a lot of unnecessary perimeter traversals.