MakerGear Forum

Hey everyone!

First post and first complete top-to-bottom process of design, slice, print for me. I love the printer so far. I printed two of the bracelets when I first received it and they are both flawless.

Today I printed hexa.g that was included on the SD card and then sliced the hexa.stl using Simplify3D and then printed in order to see the quality difference. Mine was of lower quality and took different paths but was mostly okay. There were a couple little boogers on it unlike the first I printed using the .g that came with the card. The layer height also looked different. I'm just using a .fff profile I found for the v4 M2 (I've also seen it referenced here from other people using it). My guess was the .g included was set to a high quality print. Mine was set to medium. This seems about right because the hexa.g was around 15 minutes as the booklet instructed while my print was 8 minutes. So I figured I'd dive right in to a test print of my first model (I've modeled before but not for an M2 and never dealt with the actual printers and settings myself).

It's a top hat! I printed it on medium to save time.

However, I noticed a lot of little boogers on it as well as a distinct pattern along the backside from what I can only guess is the stop/start point of the outer perimeter top hat circle on each layer. I've read in various posts that there are lots of little things to fiddle with like retraction to eliminate some of these things, but I'm not familiar with all of the settings and their purpose since I've never been the one fiddling with them directly.

I've attached some images to explain what I mean.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Some post processing will be fine but I'd love to get those perfect settings to get it right the first time. If it's as simple as "PRINT IT ON HIGH QUALITY, MAN" that will work as an explanation too, although it would be nice to know the tweaks between the two qualities that are causing these issues if that is the case.

Thanks!

Probably just due to the shape of the top hat, because certain shapes show machine marks more than others.

Anything that is cylindrical, for instance, will show the place where the nozzle starts and stops for each layer more readily than something that has a corner in it where you just aren't going to notice it as much.

If you don't want the starting and stopping point to line up like that, there is a way to make it start and stop in different places for each row in S3D:
Layer Tab - Use Random Start Points for all Layers.

Other than that - you can tweak the Coast setting to get rid of the tiny zits - another 0.1 mm. That's not bad at all really, there's just one little zit that I can see. Slice that off with an exacto.

I figured the organic shape of the object was part of the cause. I printed some styluses tonight and they were both flawless, one with the vase-mode and one normal with 2 walls and hollow body. I can see the line where each layer started but they line up since the cross section of the cylinder is uniform throughout, unlike the hat.

There were probably 6 zits on the exterior the top part of the hat. I thought maybe it was because my walls are only two layers thick (but that bit of the hat is large enough within to get the outer 2 walls, inner 2 walls, and a smidge of space left between that it filled with infill). Possible this small area of infill with only 2 wall thick beside it caused the boogers since it jiggles a lot while fast-creating the infill in that tiny space.

Thanks for the input, I'll take a look at the coast setting!