- Added a borosilicate glass bed (random amazon seller)
- Upgraded to Micro Swiss MK10 All Metal Hotend
In the process of installing the new hotend, I had to align my extruders, something I had been dreading. Well, I should have done this a long time ago, because now all my problems with the left nozzle scraping over the part printed by the right nozzle are (knock on wood!) cured.
I haven't noticed a huge difference with the all-metal hotend, but hopefully the new nozzles will also have a long lifetime. The advantages are supposed to be reduced stringing (which I have noticed) and improved extrusion rates (I haven't touched my current extrusion / feed rates which were working with the original PTFE-lined hotends)
The glass bed is pretty good. I have a shim installed so that I didn't have to use the bed leveling adjustment to take up the ~3mm difference in Z. This means I gave up 3mm of Z travel instead, but that's not a big deal.
Glass is a lot less forgiving of bad bed leveling, so it took awhile to get that dialed in. (It doesn't help that the adjustment screws defy my intution every time about which direction of rotation moves the bed up!). With PLA, I am using a "60°C" bed temperature and with ABS I'm using "110°C". It's worth nothing that the top surface of the glass is much slower to actually reach its terminal temperatuer than the sensor, so pre-heating is recommended. I believe the terminal temperature of the top glass surface is also lower than the top of the aluminum, so you may need to tweak things a bit.
For adhesive, I'm using gluestick on glass for most things, and ABS juice on glass for ABS. Prints tend to be tough to remove, so maybe I need to keep experimenting.
As far as dual extrusion goes, I continue to be vexed by an apparent
Cura (but maybe GPX) bug with temperature setting: It appears that Cura
omits T-numbers for some temperature commands, and something in the
Cura -> GPX -> Qidi toolchain applies a temperature command to the wrong
hotend. Since Cura works hard to set nozzles back to a lower temperature
when not in use, this can instead cause the right extruder (typically) to get
set to a low temperature and then used for extruding, which can cause
jams, failed prints, and delamination..
Entry first conceived on 20 April 2019, 14:54 UTC, last modified on 20 April 2019, 15:10 UTC
Website Copyright © 2004-2024 Jeff Epler