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Nice solution to the edge curl

Good solutions all! I like MDSW's idea for using the palette knife to 'fuse' the thin edge back down- I may try that as well.

Thanks for the link Flinty! The Asian buildings from Iain Lovecraft doesn't have those 'curb' bits, so I'll look around Thingiverse and OpenLock's site and see what they might have. The pieces you linked to I can use to glue my own beveled pieces to, to then clip into the courtyard tiles- they'll fasten more strongly! Plus I have the 1/4 inch thick plywood base to hide.

So one of the troubles i've had since the beginning is the attachment points of the supports on models. Between the scarring and the initial layer having poor bridging a bunch of prints (including the big beast i'm doing now) has some ugly spots. I may have just read about a possible fix though. Has anyone with a FDM printer reduced the flow in cura? The article I read just suggested it and I might give it a shot after this print is done. It's a custom setting in Cura under material settings.

I set flow at 96% in Cura these days, but it doesn't actually seem to work as when I check the Tune menu while printing, floe is still at 100%. From there, I do then dial it back to the intended 96% (if I remember) and there seems to be no adverse effect, though it's also hard to say if it makes a difference.

In terms of cleaner support contact arras,I've come round to not using Support Interfaced and slightly increasing the Support X/Y distance in Cura. The X distance defaults to the closest layer height to the input number, so it's generally at 0.2 when I'm printing at 0.1, and 0.24 when I'm printing at 0.12, which is most of the time these days for larger pieces. I find the 0.24 especially really works nicely, the supports do the job well but just snap away really neatly afterwards. Y distance I have set at 0.8, up from the 0.7 I was using.

I also don't take support density below 12% now, my experiments at 10 gave me some really bad results. If it's thr supports themselves failing, Curan4.7 has a Join Supports option that will make them a bit more sturdy, at the cost of material and time.

Has anyone had any success printing at layer heights around 0.15? I'm printing a bunch of fantasy terrain on the Ender while I wait for the Photon to arrive for mini printing, and while some stuff is pretty quick, I feel I'd get way more done with a slightly higher layer height/faster print time. Being mostly wood/rough stone I don't need super high quality, but I'd at least like it to look decent and I'm not sure whether pushing the layers past the 0.12 I've been doing so far is worthwhile.

Probably might be tough with the standard .4 nozzle - try a small test and if layers are not sticking, try boosting the flow to 125% or go to a thicker nozzle.

 Paradigm wrote:
I set flow at 96% in Cura these days, but it doesn't actually seem to work as when I check the Tune menu while printing, floe is still at 100%. From there, I do then dial it back to the intended 96% (if I remember) and there seems to be no adverse effect, though it's also hard to say if it makes a difference.

In terms of cleaner support contact arras,I've come round to not using Support Interfaced and slightly increasing the Support X/Y distance in Cura. The X distance defaults to the closest layer height to the input number, so it's generally at 0.2 when I'm printing at 0.1, and 0.24 when I'm printing at 0.12, which is most of the time these days for larger pieces. I find the 0.24 especially really works nicely, the supports do the job well but just snap away really neatly afterwards. Y distance I have set at 0.8, up from the 0.7 I was using.

I also don't take support density below 12% now, my experiments at 10 gave me some really bad results. If it's thr supports themselves failing, Curan4.7 has a Join Supports option that will make them a bit more sturdy, at the cost of material and time.

If I'm correct the 100% you are seeing is 100% of what you have laid out in your Gcode. I.e. 100% of the 96%. By reducing this to 96% you are in effect running at 96% of the 96% or 92%
I second your support findings. Going too low just causes more issues random spaghetti getting stuck into your model and no support structure

I lowered to 95% and the supports popped off really easily. Less stringing , but still some at the gaps. Had a couple issues where bridging was an issue, but I think that’s not related to the flow change. Overall I’m happy.

I've been printing scenery at 0.2mm layer heights and it's worked fine







I've just been using the default Prusa settings for 0.2 layer height.

Hey guys, sorry for the long absence, new job duties and stuff had me sidelined.

Also the hot end on my Ender3 had a catastrophic end to its run. I replaced it with a $13 hot end from Amazon (Zeelo), which immediately was an issue as it had a “runaway temperature” failure and began smoking my filament in the first 5 minutes after warming up. Thanks to Amazon the return was immediately processed without having to send the mess back, and I instantly ordered the $14 kit (which came with more tips and silicone sleeves) which arrived two days later. These were factory original parts, went on easily and are working like a charm.

I got a couple quick tests done and releveled the bed after having the Ender up on its sides to replace the wires to the CPU. Then off to the races...or troll race to begin with . Momma Troll breastfeeding the One-too-many-sake-love-child-of-Usagi-thewargamesfactory-samurai.

It’s a .stl from this months Titan Forge Patreons. Next up/now printing the Ice Giant from the same Patreon. He comes in at about 8” tall, close to 200mm.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Upper torso of the Giant is done. His legs have just started, they are a 14 hour print, so they should be done late tonight when I get home. Depending on how late I work at church this evening, I’ll either do one of his arms (both7-8 hours each) the hammer head 4hours or his cloak, which I’m going to try and reorient as right now it’s 15 hours .

Glad to hear you've got your Ender back up and running!

Nice to see that Giant at full size, I'm currently printing it at 50% scale to fit in with my other DnD giant minis, it's a great model to be sure. A good illustration of the difference the size makes to print time as well, no part of it at half size was more than 5 hours for me!

Out of curiosity I sliced the longship from TitanForge's Barbarians pack, the hull came out at 51 hours with my current settings, so that might need cutting into parts if I ever decide to print it.,,

While we're on the subject of Enders, I must say that Cura 4.7 has made a big difference to my prints, simply because Tree Supports are out of experimental and into general support settings. I've found I need to up the density, and add a wall round the supports, but I'm having way less failures, issues with the print head knocking supports, stringing between supports and model ect. Much, much cleaner prints overall, so I'd definitely recommend giving them a go.

Oh wow, that troll and giant are a lot bigger than I was expecting! I suspect I'll need to scale down to fit them onto the Mars.

Speaking of, I ordered a new tank as the pack of new feps is going to take a week to arrive! Fingers crossed that all the sticking is due to the current one being a bit damaged. Test print is currently running, so we will see if that fixes the sticking issue I've been having recently. After printing the tanks nicely, it was disappointing to see things go back to the same old issue with everything sticking to the bottom of the tank and not the build plate.

@paradigm, the boat I printed in just 22 hours. Needs a bit of clean up yet, but came out great.


I have to redo e cloak on the giant, I laid it flat to drop it down to 8hours, but way too much support damage happened.

He is 8” tall. I found another Ice Giant on Thingiverse who may be joining him shortly.

Viking house on the printer currently.

What a great giant sculpt!! Do his feet look small to anyone else?

The more I play with the resin printer and the more I see of Theo's stuff... the more I want an Ender to go with my Mars so I can do larger pieces...

 endtransmission wrote:
The more I play with the resin printer and the more I see of Theo's stuff... the more I want an Ender to go with my Mars so I can do larger pieces...

Yes! I actually am looking forward to giving the Mars a bit of a rest and firing up the Ender 3 again for some terrain once I get the stl files from some KS projects set to deliver soon.

My machines have been down for maintenance for awhile, waiting for time to get stuck in and fix what was needful.

Monoprice MP10 Mini:

I had been sawing off V6 nozzles ordered from Amazon to make them fit- the first one worked swell until it got clogged, the second started leaking (so not cut right to meet the Bowdon Tube properly in the heat block). I found that the extruder nozzle for the MP Mini-Select also fits the MP10 Mini (not always a given) a ordered some in from Gigdigit.com- they have a lot of OEM and replacement parts for a lot of different types of printers. Because of the leak, the ceramic 'sock' around the heat block was fragged, so ordered replacements for the silicon sock, ceramic tape and the high-temp tape that holds it in place. Being retired military, I ordered at least two of everything (having two is one, having only one means none if something breaks).

I replaced the nozzle with no problem, just brought it up to max temperature and wound it out with a 7mm socket. I could not get the new ceramic tape and fastening tape on- the ceramic shredded no matter how careful I was and the fastening tape either wouldn't come off the backing or got stuck on itself and was ruined. So I said to myself SCREW IT! and put just the silicon sock (or 'bootie') on and am running a print, even as we speak. So, far, good base layer adhesion, no curling, no stringing, no overheating/burning smells- just a good print even without the ceramic tape around the heat block. 6 hours into a 9 hour print, all is good.

Ender-3 Pro:

Haven't mustered the energy to mess with this one yet. But I've learned a whole lot more about how it is 'supposed' to work, so I'll get around to it one day to start from scratch bringing it back on-line.

Creality CR-6:

This actually arrived a little while ago and has just been waiting for the time to actually put it together.

The good: This sucker is quiet- much quieter than even the MP10 Mini and 'way quieter than the Ender-3 Pro. It also comes largely assembled: you only have to fasten the gantry to the base and then add the screen housing, filament holder and carry handle, make your wire connections (all easy) and your basically done. Also, this printer came with a full kilogram spool of Creality filament, so that was very nice.

The indifferent: I'm running a wall section for my Chinese Estate project as a test print (more on that below) and am about 4 hours into the 9 hour print. There is some minor stringing in the base build, but I won't know how bad it is until it gets to the true 'outer' skins of the print.

The bad: I could not get the filament past the filament feed mechanism and ultimately had to take the feed mechanism apart just to load the filament. That little bugger is tricky to get apart and put together and this must be a common experience for users because Creality have put a .pdf file on the SD card describing how to do it. The print head moves a bit jerky and I'm waiting to see on a taller print how this might affect the smoothness of the print. And the included SD card has files for printing test objects- animals and test device files- except they can't be read when the card is in the printer. When I opened the folder on my laptop, everything was there. But to actually run a print I had to re-save everything onto the SD card. Finally, I'm not convinced that the 'auto-leveling- actually did; as the print began the filament being laid down was awfully flat and squashed looking, and one corner was definitely not building as fast as the other three. The bed itself does not have leveling screws to adjust this manually- it's all or nothing through the software.

I've watched a metric crap-ton of videos on this machine so as to be ready, I may have to try to find some more to start trying to tune in this device. I did find Tomb of 3d Printing Horrors and Just Vlad to be very helpful.

So: one hit (the MP10 Mini), one ball (the Ender-3 Pro) and one foul (the Cr-6) which might curve back into fair play territory.

More follows soonest.

Might be old news, but CURA 4.8 popped up as new to me when I went to slice stuff this morning.

So i have been lax here.

I've gotten into Battletech, a game I have avoided the last 40 years . With the new plastics from Catalyst looking so nice I decided to grab a couple....then some more...now I'm jonesing for another shipment to arrive. Well why wait, I went on thingiverse and found plenty of designs. Most of them lead to 404 pages as they have been taken down, but I nabbed a few still up. With some tight adjustments on my printer I was able to get a few nice prints.

The Longbow in the front (not based) alongside two of the new plastics from Catalyst. Not Perfect, but sure stands up to my arms length rule. Also $0.16 compared to about $5-8 really sells me on it.

Local group had a meeting to start a tournament and casual play at the LGS. Had the first meeting, and I got my first game, then local government is shutting down gatherings again. So I'll Have time to print and paint more mechs (12 or so done to date with another dozen to paint), until late december/early Jan.

Best time for BT right now, there's loads of artists doing mechs and all of them are better than the metals

Every now and then the printer will do something to get me raging. A little while ago it was a massive layer shift part way through printing that turned out to be a sticky bearing on the Y axis. Usually though it's the first layer not sticking to the bed. I've cleaned the bed, used glue, hairspray and masking tape. The damn thing won't stick. So I go back and reread the instructions.

It strongly says not to use any of the tricks and tips that are out there, just use acetone to degrease. Right says I, chemical warfare it is. What have I got that will strip grease?

Nitrilotriacetic acid. Kitchen degreaser. Holy crap, it sticks like a barnacle. I'm getting the best prints ever.

Speaking of which, I've finally printed enough to make the first Space Hulk mission.

That's awesome .

Now that I think about it I haven't wiped down my bed with iso-alchohol in a bit

So I finally got some time and printed something! I figured I'd start with some relatively small stuff, so these are a few free buildings I found for Battletech. The Hunchback is an old metal model, just to show scale. They turned out pretty well, considering I had no idea what I was doing and I just stuck the first in the slicer and hit "slice now." The second I went to .2 layer height and went down to 15% infil.

The yellow filament is hard to photograph, plus my camera phone is terrible and the lighting in that room is not great. All in all though, I am pretty happy with how they turned out.

Just trying to figure if I should try sanding them or just prime and paint them to see how bad the layer lines might be.

The first print is always the most exciting! Well done, they look nice and sharp and even. At .12 or .1 layer height I find a coat of spray primer hides the lines just fine. but at .2 you might want to do a bit of sanding, or just a double coat of primer.

 Paradigm wrote:
The first print is always the most exciting! Well done, they look nice and sharp and even. At .12 or .1 layer height I find a coat of spray primer hides the lines just fine. but at .2 you might want to do a bit of sanding, or just a double coat of primer.

Yeah, I forgot to write it, that shorter building (the first print) was done at .15 because that is what the slicer defaulted to. I'll probably give double priming a shot and see how that goes, since I really don't have anything to sand it with anyway right now. I was really pleased with how sharp they turned out though, so even if there are some layer lines on these, I'm OK with that as a place to start.

Looks like I'm going to have to go back through this thread for all your tips and tricks for working with an Ender as one should be turning up around Christmas

Are there any filaments I should be avoiding/focusing on to stock up for the great winter print run?

At this point, I just start by eSun PLA+.
Not experimented with too many brands, but even so that stuff seems to get the best possible results from the Ender. Only trouble I've had is that it does seem to pick up humidity or get a little brittle when it gets really cold though, so keep it covered when not in use for a while and you should be golden.

Cool, thanks. The printer will be living on a table over the radiator... so it shouldn't get too cold

Esun pla+ (Amazon $22.99 a roll for most basic colors, put it on a monthly reorder and you will start getting 5% off) is the one I swear by . I’ve gone through 10+ rolls, and never a problem with it. I have 2-3 spools of others that have clogged up.

Being over a radiator might be an issue with humidity, you have to keep all filament dry.

If you need any other advice PM me.

his topic may have been covered earlier in this thread; if so- I apologize.

This topic may already be well-known to the printing community; in which case- why didn't you tell me?

BLUF: Some printers behave/print erratically if the SD card inserted has too much data stored on it, or if the SD card's storage capacity is beyond what the printer's micro-processor can handle.

Background: After many hours of successful prints on my Monoprice MP10-Mini, it began to behave erratically: the print head would move outside the perimeter of the object that it had- up until that point- been printing successfully (coloring outside the lines, as it were); it stopped extruding filament at a certain point (about 20mm up from the print bed); it shut off the bed heater and nozzle heater block at about the same time. And all this using gcode that had worked perfectly well before, many times.

Solution: I contacted the Monoprice help team by email as a start. They also offer online chat on their website, but I prefer to do some preliminary diagnostics first, to better shape my observations and questions if I have to go to the next level. I got a response within an hour with links to articles about filament grinding and other common 'failure to extrude' problems but also the observation that the MP10-Mini is designed to accept up to an 8Gb micro-SD card- and I had mentioned that I had purchased a new 64Gb card as part of my efforts to eliminate possible causes before asking for help (I had also resliced the original .stl file).

So I hied me hence to yon local store of electronic flummery and got a new 16Gb card- they didn't have anything as small as an 8, on the chance that the card that had shipped with the printer had gotten corrupted somehow (it came with a 16Gb card). I saved the newly resliced file onto the new card and ran it- and everything came out fine (a slight curling up of the corners, but I think that is because I have my print bed too hot- 65 degrees C- I'm going to try turning it down to 55 or even 50).

Apparently, I had been slicing various files and saving them all to the card and the amount of memory that the microprocessor for the printer could handle was exceeded and it went mad. I had tried SD cards that came with the other printers, but they were too big (64k), to full of files or both.

So, the MP10-Mini can handle a 16Gb card, just not one that exceeds 8Gb of stored files. Other printers may have similar limitations.

Something as simple as this took my printer out of action for two days. I'm going to have to rethink how I organize files I have sliced- probably store the gcode on my laptop and transfer over to the SD card just the files needed for the current project- or start an SD card for each project and keep an eye on how many files are building up. I suspect I'll use the former. For one thing, I'm frequently re-slicing .stl files because Cura keeps evolving, so there's no sense in getting a whole bunch of files in Cura 4.8 when 4.9 and 5.0 are really just around the corner.

I'm still printing and painting- will post an update with pics when there is some real change to show. Frankly, I'll be happy when this Walled Estate project is done; it's turned into a bigger bear than I first thought. As the printer(s) work more reliably, it is getting easier to start a print run and then paint, and ZZ Top covers the sound of the printer.

More follows soonest.