Slic3r PE - Preset print quality
Hi
Just wondering if someone can clear something up for me. I have been printing on my Prusa i3 Mk2S for 6 months now and am loving it. I am starting to get more confident with slicing in Slic3r PE (SPE) rather than Prusa Control (PC) which I have mostly been using.
One thing that puzzles me though is that in PC under the quality settings there is 0.3 mm layer height for draft which I have use on some larger prints with less detail.
In SPE however the Fast/draft setting is 0.35 mm layer height, I have always understood that you should print at layer heights no more than 80% of your nozzle so for my stock 0.4 mm that would be 0.32 mm max? So can you get away with 0.35 mm on a 0.4 mm nozzle or would it just fail.
Thanks
Re: Slic3r PE - Preset print quality
The highest layer height profile shipping with Slic3rPE these days is for 0.20mm. The last version of PC I tried similarly shipped with 0.20mm layer height maximum.
With a 0.40mm nozzle, you can print up to 0.32mm without issue, but as you increase either layer height or extrusion width, your maximum speeds come down. At 0.32mm layer height with a 0.48mm extrusion width, keep speeds below roughly 74mm/s to avoid extruder skips and jams. There is a lengthy discussion somewhere here on the forums wherein JP himself explains the logic of only shipping with a max of 0.20mm layer heights. You can, of course, create custom profiles with different settings.
Those guidelines of layer heights up to 80% of nozzle size, and extrusion widths up to 120% are just guidelines. You can push the limits all you like, and the results may be satisfactory for your needs. Nothing will blow up at those limits. Increasing temperatures might allow you to get away with slightly higher layers and still have some sort of decent inter-layer adhesion.
So far as speeds, the hard-fast rule is that the E3D V6 can process roughly 11.5mm^3/s of filament as your maximum volumetric speed (MVS - rate). MVS = Layer Height X Extrusion Width X Speed. Keep that in mind as you experiment with settings.
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