Retraction, or nozzle temp, or what?
Tried just about every tweak I can find to print high detail miniatures on the MK3S i3. Recently changed the nozzle to a 0.25, which seems to provide higher detail on curves. But, the stringing! It is so bad at times, that it destroys the model mid-print. I've reduced nozzle temperature and increased the retraction to the point where I freeze up the extruder (even had to replace the PTFE tube once). The smaller nozzle seems to make these issues worse. Went back to factory standards with the 0.25 nozzle. No more freezing the extruder, but the strings are ridiculous. I've even slowed the print down to 25% speed. What else can it be? It is touted that this machine can print high-detail miniatures (I'm not expecting resin quality, here). Does anyone have a secret recipe? Different material? Colors? Settings? Speeds? I'm literally running out of variable experiment.
RE: Retraction, or nozzle temp, or what?
I just spent a lot of time testing for stringing using a variety of nozzles. I worked from 0.80mm down to 0.25mm, starting with retraction 0 and z-hop 0, then incrementing retraction by 0.1mm. Once I found a level of retraction that was as low as possible to give good results, I started incrementing z-hop to see how high I could go without re-introducing stringing. Much to my surprise, I got far better results using lower amounts of retraction than higher. Here's a set of results using PETG:
I found for PETG that my best results with a 0.25mm were:
- Retraction length: 0.3mm
- Lift Z: 0.4 mm
- Retraction speed: 50mm/s
- Deretraction speed: 25mm/s
- Retract on layer change
- Wipe while retracting
- Retract amount before wipe 0%
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