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Olaf's Adventures In 3D Print Land


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Getting a little frustrated with it now. I just printed some Halflings and, even though they printed fine, they were coming off the build plate slightly at the end. That's concerning as they're not that tall or heavy.

 

I'm doing another print now, but I knocked lift and retraction speeds from 240mm/min back to 180mm/min and increased my exposure time on my bottom layers from 25s to 50s. Hopefully that helps.

 

I also spread the minis out so there is no overlap with the rafts.

Edited by Olaf the Stout
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4 hours ago, Olaf the Stout said:

Getting a little frustrated with it now. I just printed some Halflings and, even though they printed fine, they were coming off the build plate slightly at the end. That's concerning as they're not that tall or heavy.

 

I'm doing another print now, but I knocked lift and retraction speeds from 240mm/min back to 180mm/min and increased my exposure time on my bottom layers from 25s to 50s. Hopefully that helps.

 

I also spread the minis out so there is no overlap with the rafts.

Well that didn’t help. The front half of the build plate failed and while the back half printer fine, the rafts had started to become detached from the build plate.

 

Seriously running out of ideas on how to solve this problem. I’ve relevelled the build plate again and set it slightly lower. My hope is that might help. I’m running the exact same build plate again to see what the result is with the change.

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19 minutes ago, Olaf the Stout said:

Well that didn’t help. The front half of the build plate failed and while the back half printer fine, the rafts had started to become detached from the build plate.

 

Seriously running out of ideas on how to solve this problem. I’ve relevelled the build plate again and set it slightly lower. My hope is that might help. I’m running the exact same build plate again to see what the result is with the change.

 

Are all of these presupported?

Maybe the problem lies there?

I never use rafts, I always use the presupported ones as a basic start and then add more/better supports where needed.

Maybe the supports used are too light or too few?

 

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21 minutes ago, Glitterwolf said:

 

Are all of these presupported?

Maybe the problem lies there?

I never use rafts, I always use the presupported ones as a basic start and then add more/better supports where needed.

Maybe the supports used are too light or too few?

 

They are all presupported. It’s not the supports that are failing though.

 

The entire model, raft and all is coming detached from the build plate, causing the print to fail.

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11 minutes ago, Glitterwolf said:

Strange,

Is the surface of the build plate clean?

If you used alcohol or something, did you wipe that off again?

I know some people sand the build plate a little to make it more rough, it will stick better they say.

I have no idea why it’s suddenly doing this.

 

I’ve literally changed nothing about my setup, other than the FEP.

 

it’s been a frustrating experience so far. I’ve relevelled the bed again (about 4 times now), just on the off chance that was the issue as it was the front half of the plate that was failing, so maybe I wasn’t completely flat?

For reference, this was the last print attempt.

ED4B4BE7-EE76-48AB-BD3A-1A5368BF5739.jpeg

1B121545-FA1A-4417-8B47-730271C68C0E.jpeg

So the bottom left is empty as the minis failed completely and the right hand side is only partially attached to the plate.

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I think I’ve figured out why my prints keep failing. It’s because I’m a moron!

The answer was in front of me the whole time and I didn’t realise because, you know, the whole being a moron thing.

 

I was troubleshooting on Discord last night. Someone asked if, when levelling my bed, I was tightening the screws on the build plate in the right order.

 

I thought so. I’d watched a YouTube video of it and copied their process. I went back and read my manual, just to be extra sure.

Nope. The video I followed tightened their screws in the wrong order. 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

 

So I levelled again last night, this time tightening the screws in the correct order. Print ran successfully last night using all my original vroom settings, but I’ll do a bigger one tonight to check.

 

My guess is that tightening the screws in the wrong order puts a very slight tilt on the build plate, which results in some of the bed being further away from the FEP. This makes the adhesion to the build plate in that area really weak and eventually it falls off the build plate at some point during the print.

 

If that is the cause of the problem I’ll be very relieved and I’ve basically spent the last 2 days making minor change after minor change to try and solve my problem.

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Looks like tightening my build plate screws in the wrong order made my build plate have a slight tilt, causing my prints to coming off the front of the build plate.

 

Since relevelling the build plate and tightening the screws in the correct order I’ve printed 3 build plate of increasing size with no issues. The last build plate basically had the entire build plate covered in one raft with 2 big heavy minis on it and there were no issues.

 

Such a simple mistake causes me so much trouble, but I’m super happy it’s all working again.

1 minute ago, Glitterwolf said:

I hope that's the cause then!

Also, good to know!

Yep, it was. For the Mars 3 you need to tighten the front screw, then the right hand side screw. Don’t be like me and so it the other way around!

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After several good build plates, I randomly had 2 in a row where the left side of the build plate completely failed to print. Really odd.

 

I relevelled the build plate again and had 1 plate print without issue, so hopefully whatever went wrong is fixed.


These repeated issues that I can’t figure out why they’re occurring are definitely killing my printing enthusiasm a bit.

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It's definitely a hobby in and of itself, especially when things go wrong.

 

The frustrating part for me is that my printer has largely just worked for almost a year, but I've had a series of problems since my FEP broke. The prints that are successful still look great, but solving the problems has been hard work.

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Well the relevelling appears to have done the trick again. 3 build plates done without issue since then.

 

Chitubox had a 50% discount coupon, so I decided to bite the bullet and get that. I’ve heard good things about Lychee, but I’m happy enough with Chitubox for now. It also seems to be much more stable than it was 6-12 months ago too.

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