The Reality of 3D Printing Profiles | Why its Not Enough
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- Опубліковано 5 сер 2024
- The tough reality is that there are no universal settings, as each machine will require a different setting to fit different part geometries, different material types, even different geographic regions. Even in the instance of PLA, two different filament rolls of PLA can differ on age, brand, and moisture. When you move onto higher-temperature plastics like PEEK or PEI, this disparity increases.
When you move on from PLA to industrial, high-performance materials such as ABS, Nylon, PEEK or PEI, you’re entering a category of functional materials that require more time and attention to get the perfect part you desire. This is because higher-grade materials melt and adhere at specific temperatures under the right conditions, and those temperatures are generally much higher than normal -- in the 400ºC (850ºF) range. The essentially makes for a smaller window of processing, with shorter tolerances and more finicky material behavior.
In this video, we’ll cover the importance of the tuning process and what you need to know when changing settings in your slicer.
Here at Vision Miner, we recommend starting by tuning for the specific material as each is going to have a different melting point, ideal bed temperature, printing speed, etc.
To tune for the material, we follow the five-step tuning process, and it starts with establishing a baseline.
Getting your material’s baseline means finding out the recommended head temperature, bed temperature, and printing speed. These can be found either online via our website, the manufacturer’s website, or even on the material roll.
1. Input your baseline settings into a slicer program of your choice.
2. Select a small test print that gives you results in a short amount of time. In the past, we’ve used simple cubes, string-tower tests, and overhang tests to see how our material is impacted by different part geometries.
3. Simply examine your part. What you will want to look for is layer adhesion, especially for higher-temperature materials. You can examine layer adhesion by close-up visual inspection, bending/flexing, and snap tests. These let you see if layers are fusing properly. Feel free to look for gaps, holes, and blobs as well to evaluate aesthetic features and as structural properties. Most of the time, you can research using online guides to address specific issues you see with your test part.
After you’ve examined what you want to change, you can move on to adjusting your settings. At Vision Miner, we like to make a change significant enough to check for major differences, but small adjustments are usually sufficient.
The final step in the tuning process is to repeat steps 1 through 4 until you’re satisfied with the quality and strength of your calibration part. This process is highly iterative and relies on your ability to make changes to each run-through until you reach a place where your machine will print the real part with ease. Part complexity and material choice will normally affect how many times you will need to adjust your calibrations.
Once you have completed the tuning process, your printer should be dialed in for the material with which you tested. Now, you can go and print almost anything.
On occasion, you will need to go more complex for more complex geometries, but the tuning process will give you the foundational settings needed for your specific printer, part, and location.
Keep in mind: if you change your material, your temperatures, or your surrounding environment, you will most likely need to re-tune.
If you’re interesting in learning more about tuning, check back on the blog for more updates and visit our UA-cam channel for more videos!
Chapters:
0:00 - Cold Open
0:11 - Intro At Vision Miner, we specialize in Functional 3D printing, especially high-performance plastics like PEEK, ULTEM, PPSU, PPS, CFPA, and more. We also have extensive experience with 3D scanners, and a whole array of solutions available for purchase. If you're interested in using functional 3D printing and materials in your business, feel free to reach out, and we can help you make the right choice for your application.
Call 833-774-6863 or email contact@visionminer.com, and we're here to help!
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Personally, I've been finding the same exact thing with a bunch of my machines. What I've currently found is the maximum speeds that I can do while getting dimensionally accurate prints because I print my own designed woodwind.
Getting the correct tone to come out is its own Beast of a task.
Great advice, just stepped into CF Nylon and I'm finding everything said in this video to be true. PLA is ridiculously forgiving compared to nylon and PC.
This is great. I found the same thing for everything but PLA, mostly PETG, and ABS only with heated chamber. But even in those cases what my solution has been is to save the factory file or 3mf or whatever the settings file is for the particular slicer for every print I do. Then when I get a new part to print I can always look back and find a part that was similar and see exactly what settings I used to make it work. Of course even with that if it was more than a few months ago somethings are probably going to need adjusting.
This is how you become excellent at additive manufacturing. Smart idea.
Recently figured out the same....
Awesome, this summed up explaining to a customer requesting exotic filaments on their orders! I'm just going to point them to this video from now on. Thanks, guys!
This is such good information. It's a common misconception that you can get someone's print profile and then your prints will come out perfect. All the information on why you have to do your own testing to get your print/filament tuned sounds like a lot of work, but it's the reality. Great video!
Always love your videos! And yeah I believe profiles are a great starting place, but I use my spread sheet really as a starting place. I capture all my data points, weather: temperature and humidity, filament drying: temp and time, filament brand,type,temperature, chamber temperature. I'm only on PLA at the moment but will continue to add to the sheet. I also capture what profile I start with, (which includes nozzle size).
I really started to do this because I'm upgrading my printer slowly and every change I make ends up taking about a week to really dial it in including firmware changes! I have a working sheet that I use to record the changes I make each time and the result. The most valuable thing that I've learned and I believe its what you are making a point of is that you have to put in the work!
My latest example, I put in a dual gear extruder and all the documents say set the extruder steps to 130... I did that and was getting all kinds of blobbys and stringing... played with all the settings in the slicer with nothing working. I then did the extruder calibration method and found I was 20 steps off, so I set it to 150 and now I get good prints again... anyway yeah it all takes trial and error to get it tuned in proper!
I watch a lot of 3d printing youtube content just to learn new things and keep up with developments. There are very few people who I actually feel like they know what they are doing when it gets to the thermodynamics and/or chemistry of printing. And then there is this channel. It feels like I am taking a breath of fresh air even if I already knew what was going to be said. I have gotten to the point where I can just guess what changes are going to be needed for a specific machine/material/nozzle/hotend even if I have never done anything close and I can get a usable print 90% of the time. I can't wait until I finish building my HT printer so that I can take a crack at PEEK PEKK PEI and PS and have new challenges. If they are even close to as fun as POM was to troubleshoot I know I am in for a good time.
YES! And definitely not as fun as POM. But sometimes close. POM is in it's own class.... the "do not attempt if you want to maintain your sanity" class, LOL
Thank you so much for the comment, we'll keep them coming!
100% Accurate for anything more difficult to print than PLA. When I sell my custom prebuilts I now always include a slicer profile setup for my customers and it has made the amount of support setup questions drop by over 80%, so they do work wonders for PLA. Not to mention going from any slicer to say Simplify3D's custom profile for PLA, PETG, and CF is quite a change as well, but only because they have that intimate knowledge that comes from having printed with specific material and machines over a long period of time. I no longer use any prebuilt profile for any of my personal machines, as it will always be superior to dial your rig into your preferences and environment. Great content as always, thanks for keeping up the great work!
Right! Specifically, intimate knowledge and experience creates the perfect profile, each time :)
Yup, I agree with this- I named my single slicer profile "Foundation X.x.x" when I came to the same conclusions, and i treat it as just foundational good settings but every part is sliced differently
In my opinion, this is the ideal workflow.
Please, more videos with Cole. I love the way he explains things... Straight to the point.
Well done. Well said. Very edifying.
This just makes me want to standardize on one size nozzle made by one manufacturer. I keep coming back to 0.4mm and that's the one I have dialed in the most for PLA/PETG/ABS.
Thanks this was great! Im moving into doing pc, cfpc , cfnylon
I like how one guys super friendly trying to help and the other guys like read the TDS and piss off... Funny as it is I keep coming back for the information. You guys could definitely do one about whatever slicer you use and what are your go-to adjustments when you're starting with a material, besides the freaking TDS...
I love how grouchy Cole is. I can't wait til he's an old man.
@@AwestrikeFearofGods Cole's kid: Hey Dad what did you make for dinner, Cole: Read the damn TDS
Read the TDS though.
Glad I’m on the right track!
Legends! Thanks!
Our pleasure!
Hey guys, Cole here. Friendly reminder, Read The TDS
Thank you
It is great advice, but one problem I see for hobbyists is that printing test parts and iterations can become very expensive for some filaments and parts.
Dry dry dry, seems every time I’ve had issues just drying fixed it. Even pla.
Great advice thank you guys! This is also why I buy 3kg rolls now lol 😆
Feel a little better that my printer has spent more time being upgraded then actually printing. Almost have all the parts then going to completely rewire the thing with better wire and finally get down to dialing in Carbon Fiber Nylon as my main filament as most of the items will be used in a car and looking like this year will be another Summer of mostly over 100F. I would like to believe that you all make these videos for others, but the timing is uncanny with how your ideas coincide with my ideas. Thank you for being awesome.
This is very much true. Downloading printing profile is complete nonsense.
I save the profile for each material, and use it as starting point, but I pretty much tweak every attribute and test it before starting a real print.
There is also couple of adjustments that you can do on fly when you start the print (baby step, temp, flow, feed). I wish there is more interactive controls, though.
Anyhow, until we have next gen AI that would self-correct for all these issues, we have to do all this manually..
TDS: 3DXTECH is the only company that provides them, I wish this is standard for all manufacturers.
Most companies provide them in the engineering space, like Essentium -- but for regular filaments like PETG from regular manufacturers, it can be hard to find!
@@VisionMiner You are right: Essentium has even better TDS. I used it only once so I haven't paid attention.
p.s. Maybe you could do a video about what each of these numbers (TS, TM, etc) exactly means in practical sense and how they are measured? That would be priceless!
TLDR; Printing is hard.
Wait, what? You mean you have to figure it out on your own? You can't Google that? 😱
Lol! Look up the TDS!!
Ladd orijnft again 4😂 apart;