3D Printing TIL

[JonM]

What strange quirks or eureka moments have you discovered in your 3D printing journey? I'll start with mine for today.

TIL my Ender 3 with an SKR Mini E3 board really doesn't like the cold. I keep my printer in an enclosure in my basement where temperatures can get pretty low in the winter. I discovered that if the printer is too cold, it will trigger an alarm the moment it starts to heat the bed. I was able to get around this by preheating the enclosure with a hair dryer. Once it's nice and toasty inside, the printer will come up to temperature and maintain it steadily throughout the rest of the print. It just needs this little push to get started in the colder months.

[AmericanPaintball]

I added a little $10 heater from walmart, and then bought a wireless thermostat that I put in my enclosure. When the thermostat calls for heat, it turns the power on to the heater. My print room gets really cold, and also found it to create issues with prints. The enclosure helps contain heat for the most part, but I do use the thermostat and heater to help pre-heat things when I am printing early in the morning, or just one of my printers are running

[JonM]

I added a little $10 heater from walmart, and then bought a wireless thermostat that I put in my enclosure. When the thermostat calls for heat, it turns the power on to the heater. My print room gets really cold, and also found it to create issues with prints. The enclosure helps contain heat for the most part, but I do use the thermostat and heater to help pre-heat things when I am printing early in the morning, or just one of my printers are running

That's a really good idea! Thankfully I haven't had any issues maintaining temperatures inside this particular enclosure. Although, I may need to look into a heater of my own if I want to quit borrowing my wife's hairdryer.

[boarder2k7]

Eww, light mode octo? How aren't your eyes burned out? 😆

[Spider!]

I had to start from open source Slic3r on my son's old Makerfarm printer and get setting hints from PrusaSlicer. I kept getting the Z-home screwed up with extruder crashes.

One problem was the limit switch was loosely zip-tied, by design, to a screw anchor. I made a screw adjustment for it and screwed the switch down. Then I discovered that the printer would try to home with a cold extruder, which had a little blob on the end sometimes, causing the extruder to never make the limit switch. Once I found the "wait for temperature" G-codes and check boxes in Slic3r, things became a lot easier.

From oddball layer problems in an older Slic3r version, I learned that I had imperial (3/16-20) leadscrews and that this could cause some layer problems when set to 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, etc. From the RepRap Calculator I had to use 0.2032mm for 0.2 mm layers to get rid of the oddball layers. The newer Slic3r version seems to help with that some, but not entirely.

I keep the old grumpy thing because it is always teaching me something.