Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today I am recalibrating my 3D printer after leaving things to rot for a year or so. Let’s get started!
Printer Alignment
The first step in getting my printer operational again was to start from the beginning: alignment. My father got out the bubble level and I folded some large papers to get the plethora of degrees of freedom all lined up.
Tuning continued with the built-in, poorly communicated bed leveling tool. The printhead traveled to each corner and I slipped a calibration sheet under it and adjusted the corners such that it could slide, but not freely. When the right Z-axis was found to be misaligned, my father reached in and turned it a bit. I was sure it would have been frozen, but we were able to level the horizontal bar.
Temperature Tower
One well-used calibration test is the temperature tower. Regular printers use ink/toner (which original manufacturers go to great lengths to regulate) and paper (which is so standardized, it’s rare to see messed up). 3D printer filament is at least as varied and presents itself as universally interchangeable as long as it fits and the printer can melt it. As a result of differences between specific models –and even specific printers/printing environments– filament and printer manufacturers can only make broad guesses as to what the best setting will be for your specific printer.
That is where the temperature tower comes in. Instead of printing the same test shape over and over again on different jobs, they can be stacked one on top of the next and an instruction to change printhead temperature for each “floor” can be inserted.
From what I’ve gathered, temperature towers are normally assembled manually in a slicer for the exact printer, but I decided to try one straight from gcode (that went hot to cold; I didn’t want the filament freezing on the bottom and making a mess trying to print atop thin air). I didn’t first make sure the printer would be able to understand it; I didn’t make sure it would fit within my printer’s volume. I just loaded it up and hit print. Surprisingly, it worked. I had adjusted my bed a bit high and the first layer was smooshed (making it very difficult to remove), but I’m officially printing again.
I used my red filament and the tower that came out demonstrated its ability to bridge, overhang, and produce fine points. Each floor is numbered after the temperature it was printed at. The whole range was fairly good, but there was less stringing higher up, where the printhead was cooler. All other tests performed well at most temperatures.
Side Project
This month’s effort to reward award goes to getting my father printing on Debian. I sat down with him to get it working and we installed the CUPS universal printer driver and it worked with no additional fiddling.
Takeaway
Printer calibration is an important step to understand and use when needed – 2D or 3D. 3D printing is a much younger technology with a literal extra dimension for things to go wrong; it requires a greater degree of technical mindedness to keep in working order to the point where you at least need to be or know a hobbyist to have continued access to this amazing consumer level technology.
Final Question
I had more planned in terms of printer calibration, but it looks like that will need to wait for next week as I figure out the thought process for PrusaSlicer. It looks like they have some sort of preheat function in the .gcode header, but in practice, I already preheat my bed and hot end before selecting a file to print. In my workflow, this programming blurb ends up telling things to cool. Any ideas where the setting is to control it?