today i'm going to show you how to take a printer that's printing like this
and make it print like this my name is jim and this is the edge of tech
there are many things that you're probably going to end up tuning when you buy a 3d printer
but one of the most common things to tune are the e-steps
but what are e-steps and why the heck would you want to tune them so e-steps also known
as extruder steps are the number of steps the extruder motor needs to take to extrude
one millimeter of filament a few reasons you may want to calibrate your e-steps is that you change
anything at all on the extruder you put a brand new one on a new spring in a metal extruder
anything at all that changes on the extruder you want to calibrate your e-steps another reason is
that your parts are coming out very under-extruded that will lead to bad prints and inconsistencies
across all of your parts many times calibrating e-steps is a very easy update so today i'm going
to show you how to do that quick let's do it first turn your printer on go to temperature
and make sure your nozzle is set to 200 degrees celsius while we're waiting for
the printer to heat up we're going to jump on over to the computer and go to th3dstudio.com
forward slash e-step dash calculator there will be a link in the description below but this site
really makes doing your e-steps super easy it even gives you instructions if you want to do it
from another method but we're going to use this site it makes it really easy to do for the next
step you're going to need a millimeter ruler or a caliper i like these a lot and a side cutter now
what you want to do is pull the clip if you have one disconnect the bowden tube from the extruder
just like that so now we're disconnected then push some filament through the extruder just so it
comes out of the coupler like that take your snips and cut it off as flat as you can against there
like that now we need to get the current e-steps of the machine in this video i'm going to show
you how to do that on the control panel by going to info configuration advanced settings
steps and right down here you'll see e-steps is 92.6 you want to write that down right now there
is another video i'll link it above that you can do this plugging into the printer to a computer
but for now we're going to do it off the control panel now that we have our current e-steps we want
to put it in number one so we have 92.6 is what the current e-steps on the screen were the next
thing we need to do is tell the printer to extrude 100 millimeters you can do that by going to motion
move access extruder go to 10 millimeters and move this up to 100
just like that once you do that the filament should be coming out of the
extruder just like this once the filament is done extruding out of the bowden coupler
take your flush cuts and cut it flush as you can just like we did before so the next thing
you want to do is flatten your filament as much as you possibly can to make sure it's straight
then you can grab your millimeter ruler and put it up against there and see what you got like that
and you can push it up against the straight edge that helps a lot so you can actually
see what we got there or if you have a caliper you can put the caliper open to 100 millimeters
and then you want to measure it between the two larger pieces here like that so if i was doing
this it's kind of hard to do on a film but i would do this and then i would squeeze it in
to see what i actually got and it looks like this is actually short right from the factory
so it's kind of hard to see there but it looks like i have about 95.9 i'm going to call that 96
millimeters instead of 100. so we definitely need to get that fixed if the measured e-steps are any
different than 100 millimeters we need to enter that in number three in our case i measured a
couple times and i ran a couple different lengths of filament and mine actually came out to 95.8
i was gonna round it up to 96 but i think i'm going to leave it 95.8 so once you have that
number in here 95.8 go ahead and hit enter and scroll down a little bit and this will actually
tell you what your new e-step value needs to be in our case it needs to be 96.66 you can take
this put it in to the now we're going to take this over to the control panel on the printer enter in
96.66 and save that if you're getting value out of today's video please smash that like button
it really helps get the video pushed out more into the community and hopefully we can help them too
now back to it just a quick note it's always good to document your brand new e-steps
somewhere just in case the printer doesn't save it and you don't remember what that number is
and then if you want to test it all you have to do is turn the printer off
let it sit for maybe 5-10 seconds turn the printer back on and check your e-steps to
make sure it's saved so we powered the printer off for about five or ten seconds we turned it back on
now i'm going to go down and just go to configuration advanced settings
e-steps and make sure that it says 96.66 now that we've updated the e-steps you
can pull your filament back out of the printer and reconnect your bowden coupler
and put your c-clip in make sure everything's tight and that's it now you're on the road to
great prints and you've officially calibrated your e-steps all said and done this shouldn't
take you very long once you get the hot end heated up and yes you do have to heat up the
hot end otherwise the extruder won't turn and push out that filament so don't forget that part let me
know in the comments below if you plan to upgrade your e-steps or if you've done this before also
let me know what you think of that th 3d e-steps calculator i think it makes this super easy to do
it's always great working on getting your printer dialed in but you want to check out
this video right here if you want to go even further and get some amazing prints