Saturday 18 September 2010

Calibration... Cubes... Lots and lots of cubes...

I finally found time on Friday night for some more testing and some further calibration of my Repstrap machine -

The test and calibration model that is included with Reprap was a bit over-complex to start with so I used the Makerbot Calibration set by Spacexula http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2064

Printed a few 20mm Calibration test cubes to start with -
Cube on the left has the start point at the corner, and on the right it's in the middle, this told me that too much material was being extruded as it tends to blob and then over-heat at the pause before building.
So I made the reverse fillament longer, and reduced the extruder speed very slightly and also made the wait time before building short (only 100ms) this fixed most of the blob problem.

So Now I have a better start, but it's not smooth enough, so more tweaking required.
I also started using Kapton Tape on the Polycarbonate build-base, this works really well to stick the print down as I don't yet have a heated bed.


Infill changes  -  Cube on left is 1.2mm infill gap, on the right it's 0.9

Size is not bad, and it's square

Slightly too small, not sure why? it maybe the foundation layer setting, this seems to be causing me more problems than it's worth, so I'm going to switch it off for the next print - 

Reprap Host has a large number of settings, especially for the extruder's so It's taken a fair bit of time to get my head around them, but it's starting to make sense now.

I'm getting tired of cubes now so I'm going to print some of Wade's Extruder parts today, and maybe a frog or two.

2 comments:

  1. just linked this article on my facebook account. it’s a very interesting article for all.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks, check out the Skeinforge blog entry as this is a more up-to-date way to calibrate.

    ReplyDelete

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