(huffing at a slow print)
(huffing at it a bit later on.)
My aim for this episode is not to give you some fast profiles or tell you one simple
trick, because it's been done time and time again.
This is actually going to be a multi part series where I run through most of the parameters
that matter most when trying to print faster, and also explain why it matters, what they
do, and why you might or might not want to use them.
And I want to show you the time savings to put it into context.
I'm primarily focusing on Cura with this, but the bulk of these parameters apply to
other slicers too.
Anyway, Let's go!
This video is sponsored by PCBway which I will talk about later on in the video.
I’m going to just start with a straight install of cura and the default ender 3 profile
because it’s the most common basis for most bed slinger printers, so I think it makes
most sense.
Before I start though I’m also going to just mention
that you need to change your settings visibility to “all” and if you don’t create your
own profiles yet or don’t use cura, it’s literally as simple as changing any one parameter
and then selecting to create profile from current settings.
Editing from there you would choose update profile instead which is greyed out because
the standard profiles are read only.
I’m also running these tests on the ender 3 s1 plus which has the sprite extruder and
I’m going to just drop the retraction to make that work properly because an ender is
bowden and has 5mm as default.
So I'm going to get straight into it and begin
with layers.
layer parameters are some of the easiest things to tune for speed, and they're also pretty
simple to understand.
The most basic parameter is layer height and if I have to explain that to you it's easier
done visually I can print out two extremes here and show
you what I mean.
If you think about the taller one, fundamentally if it's printing at the same speed, the print
will be done in 1/4 of the time, because it's only printing every 4th layer compared to
the other, so without changing anything else at all, we can raise the line height and save
ridiculous amounts of time.
Of course, the cost is quality.
You could think of quality and layer height as inversely proportional.
Mathematically they're not unless you invent an SI unit for quality, I could do it now,
I'll call it the trevor.
There we go.
Fixed.
There is some nuance to this tradeoff though, which I will cover more in episode....3, but
for now I will just recommend that line height should be between about 0.05 and 0.3mm for
a 0.4mm nozzle and sort of multiply that by the nozzle factor I'll put what I mean on
screen, these are guidelines and they're meant to be broken
but really just intended to let you know what will work, in fact they're not even true as
you'll know from my extreme vase mode videos that the nozzle size doesn't dictate the line
height, extra points for telling me what does in the comments, but the point I'm making
is that for normal profiles, these are the kinds of ranges you have to play with, and
smaller is slower, by a lot actually.
This is one of the biggest things you can change to increase speed at the expense of
quality.
There is a setting that you may be aware of that can work as a compromise on line height
and speed and that is one that I asked you all about a couple of weeks ago, adaptive
layer height.
It's actually meant for raising speed at zero expense to quality and that sounds really
cool on the face of it, I didn't ask you all for fun though, I do plan to make a video
about it, including looking closely into some of the issues a lot of you raised with the
results being apparently less than great, aesthetically.
But it is there, your mileage may vary.
I ran a couple of tests here and found...this..but this is just...scratching the surface of adaptive
layers and as expected for cura there's a lot of parameters to mess with so it does
get its own episode I think.
Line height isn't the only thing you can change to achieve greater speed though and the second
parameter I want to look at is actually not necessarily at the expense of quality so it
is one that I use a fair bit, and that is line width and number of lines.
In cura the latter is called number of walls, and it is the...literally the number of walls
that are printed like you can see.
Again, there are nuances to this, but fundamentally more walls takes more time, and you can print
more walls and thinner walls, less walls and thicker walls.
For the range you can use for line width I'll refer you to this page by prusa which you
can go and read after the video, I'll link it below, but I personally tend to leave line
width most of the time and I change number of walls almost every print.
The tradeoff with number of walls is of course the strength of the part, and in some cases
the opacity.
Again have a look here and see what I mean.
I wouldn't ever really recommend going down to 1 wall unless you know what you're doing
but two walls is absolutely fine, as is five, this is another parameter with nuances that
we will cover in episode two, but it's there and it can be changed and you can again make
huge speed gains vs part strength if you use it.
In these videos I don't want to just trawl through the sections in sequence as it probably
would get a bit dull so I will hop around a bit between episodes, and what I want to
talk about in the 3rd half of this episode is cooling and why it slows down benchies.
But before I get into that let me show you the print quality and speed of this printed
logo our sponsor PCBWay sent me because it took me zero seconds to print it because they
printed it an…I can't even see the layer lines!
Because it’s resin obviously.
I am informed that this is made from UTR 8220 which is a catchy name, it glows under UV
and that is cool is it not?
Yes.
It is cool.
I need to do an episode on UV at some point because...well...look at it, and this kind
of behaviour actually goes way beyond glow in the dark..anyway I digress.
PCBway have also sent me a sample of I think just about every colour they currently do
for PCBs, I was thinking blue was best but now I'm thinking orange, orange looks cool
doesn't it?
There's also this clear resin print made of UTR8100 which is impossible to do with FDM
even if you do that...thing with the...you know...this just looks like clear acrylic,
it's totally how I would get something made if I wanted it to be clear…actually that
gives me an idea, I could print a…ah…best not say or someone will take my idea.
Printing resin is super easy with PCBway and you don’t even need to get the protective
gloves out or deal with the resin at all, makes me think maybe I will continue to skip
resin printing personally because it sounds like a hassle, you just upload the file and
get them to ship it to you, and I will be doing just that for a project next month so
look out for it!
Anyway thank you PCBway for sponsoring this episode and back to the…benchy thing I was
talking about!
Ever notice how the thing slows down on the chimney?
There is a reason, and it's cooling.
The quicker you print over and over in the same positi...actually I'll just show you.
This is colour changing filament, thermochroic if you want to be posh.
As you go up layers, the previous layers stay warm.
When you print the chimney, the whole thing stays warm.
Solution?
minimum layer time.
It slows down the print to make each layer take a minimum of whatever you have it set
to.
But when you want to print fast then you want to turn this off, but of course, you are gonna
sacrifice print quality but that's the tradeoff.
Improving cooling helps obviously.
Okay so I think we have time for one more quick one and that is Path optimisation.
Zhop, turn it off, it takes ages.
In case you don't know what it does, it raises the nozzle every time the printer travels,
travel being movements without extrusion.
You can get away with that being quite fast on a delta.. but on a cartesian like an ender
with a screw thread, even a 2mm z hop can add a lot of time on some detailed parts with
a lot of movement.
Secondly in this section is combing, very much the same reason, but on the other hand
this should be one of the last things you turn off completely.
You might want to use Not on outer surface for example.
I may do a whole episode on combing because it's quite confusing to the point I would
have to sit down and understand it first but yeah, it's...potentially...slower when on.
Okay that’s about it for this episode.
On screen now if I could be bothered there ought to be a graphic telling you what we
covered and or what improvements we saw.
I'm going to...hopefully...
supply patron members with some kind of short guide in pdf or something after these episodes,
to pull everything together, if you think that sounds cool make sure to check out patreon,
links below, I do appreciate everyone who already supports the channel through patreon,
it is of course a huge help and I'm going to try to make more things available to patrons
in future but also while somehow not paywalling anything, which is going to be an interesting
challenge because that’s literally a paradox.. but anyway that is the end of this episode
- make sure you are subscribed and have smashed the bell and poked the whatever so you don’t
miss the next installment where we will cover jerk [comedic pause] and infill and arachne
and who knows what else.
Let me know in the comments what you think, or just yell FIRST in the comments even though
you're not, this is also fine.
I will see you next time - Thank you for watching!