• 19 Posts
  • 614 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • How can you tell it’s under extruded?

    IMO this is the same as any other hobby. Print enough and you’re likely to run into under extrusion at some point. Similarly, I can tell if doughs and batters needs more liquid or more flower by look and touch thanks to making a ton of pizza crusts and pancakes.

    If there’s some clear sign of under extrusion it might be useful for my reference doc I use when trying to troubleshoot failed prints.

    The first photo in the album looks like ‘classic’ under extrusion. The layer lines are largely intact, but way less material that is necessary for a solid print is present. The print has better and worse areas, which usually indicates a clog. Combine this with the fact that PETG will clog if you use too much retraction and a user that’s new to PETG and retraction seems like a good place to start troubleshooting.

    As for helping your guide, simplify3d hasn’t been a ‘cool’ slicer in quite some time but they have a decent print quality guide that names a bunch of failure modes. Ellis’ print tuning guide is the best one I’ve come across.






  • I’m not going to try to dissuade you from getting a 3D scanner, but for functional prints a pair of calipers, some radius gauges, and a profile gauge will you really far. Once you get some reps in with CAD it also won’t take you long to model your designs. CAD is a great skill to learn and as you do this again and again you’ll start modifying your designs to make them easier to print.


  • Very nice! Welcome to the joys of designing and making functional parts. I suggest doing two things:

    1. Print, or buy, some radius gauges
    2. Make some test parts to understand how your filament and printer behave. For example, materials like ASA will shrink. I’ve also found that outer dimensions are much more true to CAD than inner dimensions, especially for things like smaller diameter holes for threads. Some text prints will help you figure out what input results in a given output

  • Way back when there was an American filament company that sold… very reasonably priced filament that actually printed well. As they got more popular they couldn’t keep up with demand and it seemed like they started cutting corners. This resulted in their filament not having a consistent diameter as well as the occasional foreign object in the filament (a bit of charred plastic?), which lead to jams for many of us. They ultimately went out of business due to their reputation of struggling to fill orders and inconsistent quality.

    If you still have the chunk of filament you cut off and also have some calipers I suggest measuring the end that you were trying to feed into your extruder. You could have had a physical clog, especially if your extruder was clicking.


  • Fellow Voron builder. I agree that getting reps in on other things made the build a lot easier. I found the mechanical portion of the build very straightforward thanks to things like flat pack furniture and Legos - it’s basically being able to follow well documented spacial instructions. Wiring wasn’t particularly difficult, but I’ve crimped things and built wiring harnesses before. The thing I was the most apprehensive about was getting the pi running and the initial tune, but everything is so well documented even that was pretty straightforward.

    The Voron build is absolutely long, but it’s surprisingly approachable and well thought out. I guess that’s why there hasn’t been a revision in a while.


  • Same, but I do have some level of worry regarding portability. My solution isn’t local or self hosted, as I was looking for easy and works across Linux/Windows/Mac/Android/iOS. I do not look forward to needing to change to a new password manager in the future, but given the way everything seems to be going it seems likely that I’ll have to at some point.


  • So much the same. In this market I would rather stick around with the devil I know beii have a good reputation and network. I don’t want to be the new person somewhere else should things go sideways. Grated, I am very much on the chopping block at my current employer given the waves of layoffs and “performance frings” that have been happening…