Bad seaming
Hi guys! I built my first MK3 printer a few weeks ago and I'm very happy with it! Everything works fine, but I currently I have some trouble with fine tuning the printer.
For best reference I printed the benchy from prusa with their provided gcode, I want to share some photos with you and ask for your opinion.
The left one was printed directly after assembling, the middle one I printed some days ago and the last one I printed after tightening the x-belt.
As you can see at the left side of the back of the ship, the seamings are very unclean and have a bad finish.
I tried to play around with the seam position setting, but this doesn't make it better.
The cube photo shows the problem very good. Left one was sliced with "nearest", right one with "random".
Is there anything wrong with my hardware? If not, what can I do to optimize my prints? Thank you in advance!
RE: Bad seaming
That's pretty normal. There are fine adjustments to tweak K-factor (you'll have to do some searching, but the Marlin pages have test procedures). And playing with acceleration and jerk, and retraction/deretraction can all affect the seam quality. Each printer, especially kits where the extruder Bondtech drive gear is open for positional errors, has its own set of print features that need to be worked out by the owner.
RE: Bad seaming
Just keep in mind that you can't eliminate z-seams with current consumer-grade FFF printing. You can move them around, hide them (if there are corners on each layer) and minimize them.
- I would start by calibrating your extrusion multiplier. Any excess filament extruded is going to make those seams worse.
- Calibrate the Linear Advance setting for each filament as well. LA will determine how wide that seam gap is. LA is supposed to minimize the need for coasting, wiping, retraction and other work-arounds once you have your extrusion rate calibrated.
Start with those 2, then see how bad it is. Cura has more seam hiding options you can try out. On curved layers with no corners, you'll just have to decide where to try to hide them.
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He is intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates two dimensional thinking. -- Spock in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan
RE: Bad seaming
Hi guys, thank you for your fast responses. I did a calibration of the k-factor, this was a little improvement, especially for TPU filament!
I'll play around with the extrusion muliplier to get a better print quality, thank you for your support.
I'm feeling reassured after you don't tell me "your benchys looking worse, your assembly was bad" 😊