Why my filament settings are not the same as yours
I get a lot of requests (here, Printables, Discord and elsewhere) to share my settings for "Brand X" filament. I'm fine sharing but it does get tiring when (in one case) a person complained to me that my settings made him "waste filament". So the short of it is, if it works for me it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work for you unless you are printing flexi dragons and gridfinity boxes.
When I use a filament for the first time (even if there is a Prusa provided profile and even if it's Prusa filament) I spend a day (or more) running calibration tests for various nozzles and print beds. I have an installation of OrcaSlicer that I use for creating and executing most of the tests which I then copy over onto PrusaSlicer. Why don't I just use OrcaSlicer you ask? I don't like the UI on MacOS.
My typical workflow for each nozzle (size and type) I plan to use:
- Dry for 6-8hrs (important to always do this first!!!)
- Temperature tower
- Max volumetric flow
- Shrinkage. I use Califlower for this and only do this once since it's an intrinsic property of the plastic.
- Extrusion muliplier. YOLO is impossible to interpret (for me) so I just do a 40mm cube in vase mode and measure the wall thickness.
- Pressure advance
- Retraction
- First layer test (to get the bed temp set)
I then create profiles for each combination of nozzle, filament and bed. The only parameter that is constant here is the shrinkage. When I'm ready to do a print I will more than likely end up tweaking some of these settings depending on what it is I'm printing.
RE: Why my filament settings are not the same as yours
I'll add here that if you are primarily downloading stuff from Printables and printing only in PLA or PETG then I wouldn't worry too much about what I stated above. This really only applies to engineering filaments and functional prints were sub-millimeter accuracy is important.