How do you "calibrate" your new non-Prusa filaments? And does it matter?
Prusa filament is very hard to get where I live, and importing it from CZ means paying as much in import fees + shipping as the filament costs.
So I buy the Amazon-Special filament which yields mediocre results with the "Generic" profiles. Upon closer inspection, the only differences between the various PLA profile presets in Prusa Slicer seem to be the price and that's it. All other parameters are the same, which makes me question the point of having anything else than the Prusa filament presets + a generic preset for each type of plastic rather than a million brands in there.
Which leads to my question: how do you calibrate new filament to get the best of it? Printing a temp tower is a bit tedious but it's an obvious way. That won't help with speeds, retraction, extrusion multiplier... How do you figure these out? Is it even worth it, or just making a temp tower enough?
RE: How do you "calibrate" your new non-Prusa filaments? And does it matter?
I use PLA from Inland/eSun, Atomic Filament, Paramount-3D, Prusament, Jessie, Hatchbox, Anycubic and FilaCube. For all except Prusament and Inland/eSun I use the Generic PLA profile. For Inland/eSun I use a slight higher nozzle temp because it's PLA+. All other settings I leave as is. I feel my print quality is excellent.
RE: How do you "calibrate" your new non-Prusa filaments? And does it matter?
I usually run a simple one-perimeter-thick hollow calibration cube with each new filament, to adjust the extrusion multiplier. I mostly use quality filament, not super cheap Chinese crap, and most of it will print just fine with Generic profiles. If I run into an issue, say stringing, I print a temp tower to see how low I can go. I usually don't bother with optimizing stringing parameters unless it's a production model I sell; it's a rabbit hole, and more often than not the heat gun is the faster solution…
Formerly known on this forum as @fuchsr -- until all hell broke loose with the forum software...
RE: How do you "calibrate" your new non-Prusa filaments? And does it matter?
I've had very few non-Prusa filaments (and I would guess that 95% or so of my filament has been non-Prusa) require any adjustments to anything to properly print.
Most of the well-known brands print fine with the PS generic defaults.
The only one that comes to mind immediately is Mika3d, the PLA metallics, which need a 5-10 degree bump in nozzle temperature to avoid an occasional jam.