Full Printrbot plate. Bet you'd love to see slic3r settings.

[FalconFour]

[mdfast1]

Awesome post. I've read it all once. Now I need to go home and digest it all and read it again. Printing some feet tonight, and working on Bed Leveling.

[plexus]

Well, either you are having a lot of problems that I'm not having, or you are being much more picky than I am. not that being picky is a problem. i can see with 3D printing that there is a lot of potential quality that can be achieved. maybe I just feel ok about the results I am getting. yes i have some little problems here and there but this is exceeding my expectations. so im happy. and i can see more room for improvement of the hardware that will likely result in better prints. but at the same time i understand that Brook's goal was to make (one of) the cheapest 3D printers on the market at the moment. I think he achieved that with some sacrifice in quality.

But the info in your post is fantastic and offers a whole other detailed level of tweeking possibilities! thanks for that! its very useful and interesting and will help anyone who is trying to squeeze the most out of their printrbots.

[FalconFour]

[Mooselake]

Impressive post, will study it in much greater detail when I get some spare time!

Check out drawcut's spur extruder gear. He's a professional gear designer (I'm an amateur low knowledge gear dinker with Gearotic Motion) and has given the extruder gears the attention they deserved. They're on my list of things to print.

Kirk

[drawcut]

Very nice work. I'll have to take some time to digest all this, for sure. I have played a bit with accelerations and jerk after another member here posted about it in their blog (Lincomatic, I think). But I really haven't had much Printrbot time lately between work and multiple car issues. Hopefully I can get back to PB things soon.

Edit: Thanks for the shout out Mooselake. There'll be something extra in your check this week.

[plexus]

@FalconFour can we see a closer up better quality shot of that big herringbone gear?

[FalconFour]

Here.

I'm still in "watching the machine throughout the whole print... GO FASTER, DAMNIT!" mode, so print quality suffers for speed. Once I find a way to place the printer apart from me, maybe network it in my bedroom's attic-space-accessible (vented) closet, I'll be able to slow it way down and get better quality. But this is 2 gears and 4 pulleys printed in under an hour with the modified "jerk" and acceleration parameters.

Photo Aug 08, 8 58 00 AM.jpg
(best quality I could fit under 256kb for the forum. BTW, why is that limit so low? Web host trouble? Storage is dirt cheap these days, it'd be nice to be able to post larger attachments, like larger STLs as in the build above...)

I 100% plan on printing that spur extruder gear. I love that it foregoes fancy curly-que circles in the complex back-pattern for a simple "spoke" design. Makes a damn ton more sense and looks a WHOLE lot quicker and easier to print. And the gear design makes a lot more sense too. Can't wait to try it.

[plexus]

[FalconFour]

I use 0.5mm layers, because of the 0.6mm nozzle and the "OH MY GOD HURRY UP ALREADY" factor. I've been nervous about peeling/curling parts for so long it just became a habit. Plus, whenever I get the layers smaller, it seems to start slopping, extruding too much plastic (though my E-steps are calibrated and the thickness is set - I seem to have to enter 2.97mm into slic3r, for example, for what I measure as 2.87mm filament). And when too much is put down, it leaves bumps hanging up that the nozzle crashes into while traveling. Thicker layers resolve that, it seems...

[SolidVis]

[augspark]

This thread is awesome, thanks for all this great info everyone. I am just barely getting started myself (maybe only on my 6th print), so I have this post open while I try to figure everything out. So far, I have a lot of the same issues as the OP - but overall I am quite pleased. SolidVis - could you tell us a little bit more about how you have things set up to produce such excellent quality? That picture of the big gear is amazing! Is that the natural ABS that shipped with the printrbot?

[SolidVis]