New user, success with Printrbot filament only

[p25486]

Hi, I've had some good prints with the translucent filament that came with my Printrbot Metal Plus. But, it ran out.

I moved on to a roll of white PLA filament that I got from Adafruit.com. Things are a little off.

At first, layer 1 temp of 195, didn't see to stick too well to the bed.

I'm now at 205, with 200 for all other layers. The first layer sticks fine, but I'm getting very large spiderwebs. The webs I think suggest the temp is too high, but any lower and I get some non-straight lines being made (little curly cues). Maybe the temp is still too low? Maybe I need to reduce the flow rate?

Bed temp is 70C.

I'll post an image of my first white print later. I got cocky and tried a cell phone case. Not such a great result. There are bumps along the "smooth" sides, and lots of thick webs from when the printer moved from location to location.

One thing, I did set the extruder nozzle size down to 0.4, from the default of 0.5 in repetier. I think I read somewhere that maybe 0.3 would overcome some issue with repetier, but then my first layer thickess is off. Should I go back to 0.5mm?

Most of prints up to now looked good with the translucent filament, but I can't say how solid a solid face is, seems more like a screen than a wall. I can see light pass through openings between filaments in the first cube for instance. I thought that changing the extruder nozzle size would fix that.

Thanks,

John

[evanalmighty]

You can play around with different settings in Repetier, but the nozzle size should not be one of them. Set it to .4mm (if that's what it is) and don't change it. Temperature, extrusion multiplier, extrusion width, print speed, layer height, and filament diameter are some of the main settings that can/should be tweaked.

[thawkins]

[Bob-StPaul]

Did you check the filament diameter of the new filament and adjust your settings accordingly?

I'd also recalibrate your extrusion for the new filament.

[p25486]

Thanks for the info.

I adjusted the temperature of the extruder up, and lowered the bed. I seem to get decent results at 215C for the extruder, and 60C for the bed. I may go back up to 65, as the corner of one print came up.

Prints look much better, far less webbing.

I still see some strangeness in the second/third layer. Maybe just the 2nd, where the outer dimension is less than the base or the layers above.