Good day!!

Today we will go over some minor things to look at when you are 3D printing to get some higher quality prints.

First off i would like to talk about the different types of slicers that are out there. The problem I find with the slicers that are out there currently, is that one day you will find one that works well, prints well, and the UI is ok then the next day it gets updated and produces nothing but shitty prints. I have found this to be a long standing issue. So I find I never updating my slicers until well I update them and then the pain of figuring out what one is good right now begins. I just had this happen I upgraded cura from a old solid build and now i cant get it to print anything but trash.

A foamy cube with all sorts of nasty noise

An ugly cube

I at first thought it was my printer as i had just upgraded it at the same time i did the software but after running some old gcode i found this not to be true. So i ran a new big print.

 

Snowball maker seen at http://skywurz.com/sky/145

 

You can see in the snowball maker all of the lines and noise it was terrible so back to thinking it was the printer i started printing calibration pieces and checking for over extrusion.

 

Please open this pic of my test cubes to see them in higher detail you can see i tested extrusion multipliers starting at 70% and working to 100% you can see that somewhere between 90-100 is about right for good top layer but the print just seemed like garbage

 

 

all in all i was not happy with how my prints where turning out. as you can see here 4 prints all the same gcode but different flow rates all look about the same in quality this is where i had my last straw i decided i was going to try a different slicer

 

in this photo you can see a cube from slic3r(top) and simplify 3d(bottom) they both are a bit over extruded as they are both at 100% extrusion

 

Simplify 3d 100% side view

Slic3r 100% side view

 

Simplify 3D 70% side and top views

 

As you can see the slic3r prints came out cleaner than even my cleanest under extruded simplify 3d print so i decided to go big with a print to prove the point

 

Nice smooth print no z artifacts no ringing nothing but what does this prove that simplify 3d sucks? No. it proves that this week slic3r is working better than the newest simply 3d and the newest cura but next week when something gets tweaked the wrong way in slic3r that can all change. this rings true for all slicers. i got the clue when i looked very closely at the gcode that where the starts and stops and messy restarts where from simply 3d i got artifacts all over my print. I think what i will take away from this is something i have always done and said and that is look closely at your gcode and if you find something thats working well stick with it. sometimes its not worth being on the bleeding edge of updates especially with slicers.

 

Skywurz