Help! Print Warping and Sliding off of Plate after 2 hours.
In the past few days I have attempted to print a large gear out of PLA. About 70% of the way into the print the gear becomes loose on the plate and completely detaches. This has happened three times.
1. After the first time I checked the Z calibration, and moved the calibration slightly more negative. I also lowered the bed temperature from 60C to 55C.
2. The second attempt ended up leaving the plate again after about 75-80% of the way through the print. In response I lowered the Z calibration further, cleaned the bed using 70% alcohol, and I lowered the bed temperature to 50C.
I measured the gear at multiple points on the gear and noticed that there was about a tenth of millimeter difference on each side. This leads me to believe that there is some warping occurring.
After cleaning and recalibrating I printed the gear for a third time. After about 70% of the way through the gear detached once again. On this print I measured the same discrepancy in size around the gear.
My current plan was to move the z calibration once again and change the temperature of the bed.
I am about at my wits end and would love to hear any suggestions.
Note: I recently replaced the hot end of the printer.
RE: Help! Print Warping and Sliding off of Plate after 2 hours.
In order for us to assess better the issue, it would help if you save your project as a ‘3mf’ file and upload it here ( It needs to be compressed into a ‘zip’ file before, else it won’t be accepted ).
Anyway, some questions come to my mind :
Which printing plate are you printing on ?.( smooth, satin, textured ). Are you printing inside an enclosure ?. Actual room or enclosure temperatures ?. Are you using any kind of adhesive on the plate ?. Are you sure Z offset is perfectly tuned ? Which brand of PLA ?. Do you get noticeable stringing on the model ?. Have you dried the filament ?.
It occurs to me that lowering bed temperature won’t help, rather on the contrary, bed adhesion increases with temperature, else we’d print PLA on a cold bed.
RE: Help! Print Warping and Sliding off of Plate after 2 hours.
It is a textured plate.
I print inside a room, the ac is not working but there are large fans regulating the temperature.
I use no adhesive on the plate.
I ran many z layer calibration tests that looked good to me.
The PLA is hatchbox brand.
There is not noticeable large strings. On a smaller print that was successful there were some wispy strings.
I am not sure what drying the filament entails.
It was my understanding that decreasing the temperature of the bed would decrease the warping. Thank you for the help.
RE: Help! Print Warping and Sliding off of Plate after 2 hours.
In addition to the textured, do you own also a smooth plate?. For PLA prints prone to warp, I’d use the smooth, it has much better adhesion than the textured. Adhesives help as well. I don’t like the white glue stick recommended by Prusa, It tends to leave a rough bottom on the prints. IMHO products based on hairspray are preferable (3Dlac, Laverneer or just ordinary hairspray).
Software settings : enable a wide brim on the model and a maybe a protective shield, as the printer isn’t enclosed. Raise a bit the standard bed temperature, say 65-70C instead of 60.
If you own a smooth plate, I expect you already recalibrated the Z offset for this plate and stored the value on the profile. Don’t forget to change the plate type on the menu.
( Sorry if you know already all this ..)
P.S. Drying the filament is always a good policy, although PLA isn’t very troublesome in this regard. PETG or ASA are much more sensitive, while other filaments like TPU or nylon need to be really dry or you’ll run into lots of trouble with stringing, blobs, rough surfaces and whatnot.