Hey folks, Alan Mandic, MandicReally here.
I've got some tuning
to do on a 3D printer, namely this big blue monster right here.
Not this one!
I'm talking about the Elegoo Neptune 3 Max, but what I'm going to show you
is the same process I apply to every 3D printer
I use, no matter the firmware or configuration of the machine.
Let's get into some tuning.
I am not at all going to claim that this is the end
all, be all tuning guide for a 3D printer.
This is the way that I approach it & the way
I'm going to approach it on this machine.
I need to do it anyway.
So I figured I'd bring you folks along so maybe you could learn something.
Or maybe you have some input
you could leave
in the comments down below to let me know how you would do things differently.
One of the first things I do on a new printer out of the box is tune
the extruder step count, aka E-Steps.
On Klipper, we would generally do Rotation Distance.
I'm running Marlin on this machine, so I'm going to do E-Steps.
So I'm first going to heat up the hot end to extrusion temperature on this machine.
Then I'm going to mark the filament away from the extruder assembly.
I'm using a pair of calipers that I will set against the top
of the extruder housing and mark 120 millimeters of length.
Now I'm only going to be extruding
100 millimeters of filament for this testing process.
But if I marked at 100 millimeters and I was over extruding,
I would actually go past that mark and not be able to measure the distance
that I over extruded by.
Now that I'm heated and I have the filament marked,
I just need to command the machine to extrude 100 millimeters of filament.
Lucky for me, the menu system on the Neptune 3 Max allows me to enter
a custom value and I can easily do this with my machine.
Preheated the filament loaded and marked.
I extrude 100 millimeters of filament.
From here on, I would recommend writing down the numbers
you're working with so you can keep track of them.
I'm going to go into the menu system of this machine and see what my E-Step
number is. In this case, it's 415.
Then I need to measure how much filament was actually extruded.
So I'm going to go from the top of this housing up to the line that I marked
previously 120 and see how much that distance is.
In an ideal world, there would be exactly 20 millimeters there.
It's usually not exact though.
In my particular case I'm measuring at 20.45 mm.
Which means if I subtract that from 120 millimeters,
I extruded 99.55 millimeters
of filament, when I commanded this machine to extrude 100mm.
I'm going to take these numbers, I'm
going to plug them into a formula to give me my new step number.
The Teaching Tech calibration website from Michael has a calculator on it.
So if you're not the greatest with math,
it can really help you out getting through this process.
For your information, this is the formula and it does require the order
of operations to be followed.
So that means that I first need to take the commanded extruded amount,
100 millimeters and divide it by the actual extruded amount,
the measurement that I took.
In my case, 99.55.
I now need to multiply that number that I just got by my current E-Step number,
which is 415, and that will give me my new E-Step value.
On the menu system of the Neptune 3 Max I can only go in one
step increments, I cannot go in decimals.
If I was using a laptop or a computer to remote into the firmware, I could go
a little finer on my adjustments, but honestly, I'm not that worried about it.
I recommend you do this three maybe four times in a row
because you're going to be narrowing in on a good number.
Your variation between the way you measure filament from one time to another
has some room for error.
So you're going to get finer and finer results the more you experience
you have with this and the more tests you do back to back.
In fact,
I had previously tuned this machine's E-Steps, but in the course of
filming the process for you
folks, I came up with a different value and ended up changing my settings.
If you're 3D printers, menu system does not allow you to see Steps
or adjust them,
you will need to use a computer and a USB cable with some software
to terminal into the machine and issue G-code commands.
The Teaching Tech calibration website has a pretty good guide on how to do this.
Before I move on to the fine filament tuning, I'm going to install a BondTech
0.8 millimeter nozzle onto the Neptune 3 Max so I can do some really big prints
for my review of this machine Let's get this thing installed!
With that
0.8 millimeter nozzle installed we're ready to start tuning filament.
We are going to be tuning the filament to this specific printer.
So whatever values you get from the test, I’m about to show you,
apply to THIS filament, on THIS machine.
They don't necessarily apply to that same filament on a different machine.
It might give you a baseline starting point, but I absolutely recommend
testing individual materials on individual machines.
And just because this PLA has one set of values
does not mean that this PLA from an entirely different manufacturer,
and even a different colors can play into this, is going to want the same thing.
When we're tuning in Filaments, of course, one of the most important things
we can worry about is temperature of extrusion.
Most spools have a number on the side of it, telling you
what temperature range the filament will fall into.
But I know say the PolyTerra PLA
that I'm printing right now says 190 to 230 Celsius.
That is a huge range!
Those ranges on the spools are a ballpark to get you started,
but they are not going to give you
the proper extrusion temperature for your machine, with your filament.
You're probably familiar with it, you’ve probably seen it before,
but a temperature tuning tower is a great way to test out materials
and see what is going to work for you.
There are a couple of ways to go about this.
You can download an STL and manually modify the G-code as you go up in height
to adjust the temperature you’re going to be running for the extrusion.
Or you can download G-code off of random sharing sites,
maybe for your machine it's already sliced ready to go.
I don't generally recommend downloading and running G-code,
but for temp towers it's usually fairly tested.
Or you can use a calibration test generator such as in-built
into SuperSlicer or SoftFever fork of Bambu Studio.
That's what I'm running here now, and it's going from 230 Celsius
at the bottom to 190 degrees Celsius at the top.
We'll take a look at what results we get out of this thing
when the temp tower finish.
We get to take a closer look at it.
And that's basically what we need to do is look at the thing.
I just will
start looking at all of these and seeing which one looks the best to me, visually.
The bottom one at 230C I can see some clear part
curling on the ramp of it,
which tells me that it was a little too hot and not enough part cooling.
A common problem on larger and faster printing.
The other end of the spectrum, the 190C has the least stringing on the print.
It has less part curling, the top surface looks pretty darn good to me.
All around that looks really good.
But that little tower inside a little window is not just for
stringing, it's also for strength and layer adhesion.
So I'll take a pair of pliers and I'm going to push on that little tower
and try and break it off.
I do this for all of the temperature
towers, checking which one has the best layer adhesion.
Now, this is absolutely just a judgment call.
How it felt to me, to me to 220 actually
felt like the most effort to break the tower off.
This is a Matte PLA so it doesn't have the greatest layer adhesion,
so it wasn't that difficult to break any of these out of here.
Now, I could use the Teaching Tech Calibration Website to go generate
a new tower, say between 190C and 215C
in smaller increments to really dial in on a good temperature.
For this, I really feel like what I'm seeing here is aligning
with what I know of this material on other machines that I run.
So I'm probably going to just do some test printing between 210 to 215
to try and balance out strength and stringing and curling
on this material with a ballpark idea of what temperature I want to be running.
It's time to move on to the other tests.
I'll use this temperature moving forward.
I'm going to start by tuning Linear Advance.
I find that Linear Advance between nozzle sizes can vary pretty dramatically.
So I want to start there and not have my previous 0.4mm
nozzle setting affect me moving forward.
If you're not familiar with Linear Advance
or Pressure Advance, what it does is actually reduce the amount of extrusion
force as it comes up to a corner or the end of an extrusion line.
Think about having a bottle of ketchup and you're squeezing it onto a plate.
As you're drawing a straight line with that,
when you get to the end of that line, if you do not reduce the amount of squeeze
you're having and you just pick it up and stop,
you'll probably end up with a blob at the end of your line.
That's what Linear Advance is trying to combat.
It is tapering off the extrusion force toward the end of the line that it knows
is going to be there so that you don't get that blob or as you're turning a corner,
it has to reduce speed just enough that that blob could then occur there.
To test here, I'm going to use the new Ellis Pattern Generator
instead of lines drawn on your bed or a tower printed off of it.
It's a bit of an object with a handful of layers
where individual arrow shapes are printed
to change the values at different point and see what results you like best.
This is honestly pretty easy to set up.
I was able to go through here and dial in how I wanted, add in my bed dimensions,
designate what firmware I'm using on this machine, and I also adjusted
the values of the intervals between the Linear Advance tests.
So this pattern does a handful of things.
It has a 90 degree corner on it, so we can look in that corner for a bulge
or for the extrusions to narrow too much as they are
on the end of this test pattern.
And then at each side we have an end of the line so we can look
for the change in extrusion there as well.
There's also a number grid on the side to designate what the different Linear
Advance values were so we can pick which ones the best and know the value for it.
In this particular instance, it looks to me like 0.054
is where I need to be to get the best result.
The corner could be crisper, but because I'm using a 0.8 millimeter
nozzle, the diameter of that corner is probably always going to have at least
a little bit of a radius to it.
So I'm fine with this.
This has good consistent extrusion all through the arrow, the corners,
about as crisp as it is on any of these lines.
So this is the one that I'm going to go with.
Savings value is really pretty straightforward.
On some machines
you can do it through the menu system to put it into the firmware and save it.
The Neptune 3 Max does not have that option
and I really don't like doing it that way anyway.
As I said, this value can differ from one filament to another,
so the better way to do it is to put it into the Start
G-code of a filament profile.
Specifically for this filament in your slicer,
I'm using some Polymaker PolyTerra PLA for this testing,
so I'll create a profile in my slicer with that name.
And then in the Start G-code for the filament, I will put in an M900
space Kand then whatever value my pressure advance was.
In this case, mine is 0.054.
That's for Marlin firmware.
For Klipper, it's the string of words here that you enter your K value into.
With Linear Advance out of the way it's pretty downhill from here.
Next thing I do is Extrusion Multiplier a.k.a Flow as it's called in Cura.
This is where we are fine tuning the extrusion rate of individual materials.
Getting the mechanical system dialed in with E-Steps is one thing,
but then individual filaments will flow differently.
Some folks skip E-Steps altogether and purely use Extrusion
Multiplier to offset for mechanical differences.
I like to tune both.
The way I'm going to do this is prints and rectangular chips of filament.
It's very straightforward to do it this way.
I use the SoftFever fork of Bambu Studio as my primary slicer as of late,
and it has a built in calibration test to do this.
But you can really do this on any slicer
by individually printing a handful of these chips.
If you want to do this manually, I'll show you how to in PrusaSlicer real quick.
You don't even need a model to download.
Just add a shape which is a rectangular box.
In this case, I'm just going to squish the Z height of it down
because I don't need to print a big calibration cube to do this.
Make sure my top and bottom layers are set to a value
that's going to leave some sparse infill in the middle of this print.
So it's not a solid 100% Infilled object.
And then I'll go into my filaments profile and a set my Extrusion Multiplier.
I'll start at one which is 100%(.1), and then I'll work my way down.
All the SoftFever calibration test is doing is taking the work out of this.
It's just creating individual
objects for you and setting the values on each of them separately.
Unfortunately, PrusaSlicer cannot do that.
I don't believe Cura can either. Then we go to the printer.
We print off our individual chips of Filament,
whether we do it as a full test pattern like I did, or you can do it one by one
if you have to.
Once I have these handful of chips printed out, I can start to look at them
closely and look for inconsistencies or issues in the extrusion.
Such as this -9 chip right here.
It has gaps between the lines on the top infill
that's telling me this was under extruding while printing.
On the other end of the spectrum, I have the 0 chip here which is a 100%(.1)
multiplier and that has ridges in the top infill where it looks like
the nozzle was digging through filament a little as it was printing.
Which tells me this was over extruded.
I'm looking at all these chips
looking for the point where this is extruding not too much and not too little.
We're looking for the Goldilocks zone.
I personally find that Polymakers filaments, in general, flow really well.
Meaning they need to dial back the Extrusion Multiplier a bit.
In this testing right here I'm seeing -5, -6, and -7 looking best.
-7 I see some little under extrusion at the ends of the lines,
but I usually try to favor on the lower side of the extrusion.
But that's me wanting good looking prints.
If I'm more worried about strength, I might favor a little more on over
extrusion.
That way our layers are really squishing together,
so that -5 or even maybe -4 might be a better value.
This is one of those things you're going to have to learn to eyeball
and figure out what works for you,
what feels best, or what works best in your form of printing.
If you're printing models that you really want to look good,
you might want to under extrude just a little bit
so you get nice cisp corners and less blobbing.
If you're more worried about the functionality of a print versus
the looks of it, you might want to over extrude a little bit.
There's absolutely room for interpretation as to what order you should do
these tests in, as each of these variables can affect one another.
But the next one, you should wait until after you've done your Temperature,
Linear Advance and Flow Rate testing, and that is Retraction!
I say that because Retractions
are kind of a Band-Aid for things that the other tests are solving.
If your temperature is really dialed in, you've got a good Linear Advance
and your flow rate is where you want it to be.
You may find you need little to no retraction.
With a 0.8 millimeter nozzle having a pretty large orifice
that’s unlikely in this situation, but it can happen.
The test I'm going to use for Retraction is off of the Teaching Tech
Calibration page.
You can go in there and configure your own retraction values,
set your temperatures, add Start G-code, everything you need.
This generator worked beautifully,
and it's what I would recommend using for Retraction tuning.
This will generate a tower
that has different retractions for different heights.
In my case, I'm doing .2, .4, .6, .8,
1 and 1.2 millimeter because I am running direct drive.
As with all the other tests, it's time to print this thing.
The point of the retraction tower is that the different heights,
it will adjust the amount of retraction used.
So I generally like to start with a low amount of retraction and work my way up
so you can see the improvement as things travel upward and the more retraction.
And you can clearly see that as we went up in .2 intervals
from 0.2 to 1.2, there is a clear improvement here.
I expected a little better from this, but with this machine
it looks like I need 1 or 1.2 millimeters of Retraction.
I decided to run this test
three times to test out temperatures combined with retractions.
So I did 205, 210, and 215
as my temperatures, and I really didn't find much of an improvement.
So I think I'm going to stick with that right around 215 to keep my layer
adhesion up, but still get some of the better
properties of the slightly cooler temperature.
With those tests out of the way, it's time for the ULTIMATE TEST!
Print testing.
Slicing up a design, throwing a print down and seeing what results we get out of it
so we can confirm that all of what we've done is going in the right direction.
Since I'm running a 0.8 millimeter nozzle, I'm going to do a 200% Benchy
and 0.4 millimeter layer height.
Let's get this thing printed so we can look at the results.
I came back into the studio after this finished printing, saw
the dramatic lighting and just had to film it this way.
So is this a perfect Benchy?
By no means.
But for 200% Benchy at a 0.4 millimeter layer height
that printed in just over 2 hours, I think it turned out pretty good.
Looking closely at this thing, the biggest thing that stands out to me
is the Retraction and Linear Advance are still not quite dialed in.
And this is exactly why I printed this, because those tests are great
for getting you in the ballpark,
but they don't really translate to the real world all the time.
Honestly, looking at this, I think I could stand to go
be a little more aggressive on my Linear Advance, bump it up
a little more and dial back my Retractions, because I'm getting
just the tiniest bit of a blob with a tiny bit of space after it.
I could be wrong though, and that's something
I need to play with as I further tune this machine in.
That's kind of the way it goes with 3D printer tuning.
You're always going to be evolving and changing what you're doing
as you move forward.
Our results weren't perfect. I'm not perfect.
3D printing in general is kind of an imperfect science.
We're spewing out molten plastic, forming solid objects out of it.
There's a lot of variables at play,
I guess where I'm going to wrap it up for this one folks,
I've got to get print
testing on the Neptune 3 Max so I can get the review out for this machine.
I got some big stuff to lay down!
So I'm going to get to that.
If you want to check out another video where I did some printer tuning in it,
check out my previous Workshop Vlog where I worked on my Voon 2.4, FLSun
V400, and Project Re-Animaker, got those printing better!
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