Hi all, I’m curious if anyone has some thoughts as to why I’m getting strange squishing around layer 8 or so. I’m not thinking its elephants foot because the layers beneath look ok. I’ve tried a number of things to counter act in Orca-slicer or on the printer to no avail:
- Elephant foot compensation
- resetting the z-offset
- turning off z-hop
- slow printing for the first 10 layers
- different temperatures on both the bed and at the extruder
- cleaning of the z-axis lead screws
This seems to be happening regardless of the type of filament used… any thoughts? Perhaps some other mechanical adjustment such as the backlash nuts on the z-axis lead screws?
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Greg
Latest update:
After a good deal more testing of various combinations of settings for first layer print speeds and elephant foot correction in Orca combined with adjustments to the Pom wheels, cleaning and relubing the lead screws and fine tuning the z-offset, I have gotten to a pretty good place. Here is the process that I used to get things tuned.
- Tune the hardware. I cleaned and re-lubed the lead screws. After that I loosened up the eccentric nuts on both sides for the the z axis until the wheels would turn freely. Then i slowly tightened them up until they were no longer freely spinning. I think it was about a half a turn or so
- I ran the paper test to get bed leveling in ballpark. Not to get it perfect, but good enough for bed adhesion.
- At this point I started using all the calibration tools. I followed the guidelines set out in the following page: Welcome! | Ellis’ Print Tuning Guide. I can’t recommend it enough.
- I just kept making small, incremental adjustments to the z-offset until i reached a good balance of bed adhesion and minimized elephants foot. I’m not perfect yet, but MUCH better than I was.
WHAT DIDN’T WORK (for me, at least)
- Elephant foot adjustments in Orca. I kept measuring the problem using calibration cubes, adjusting the elephant foot compensations and increasing the number of layers requiring the compensation. More than anything, this seemed to exacerbate the problem. I would start out with a little bit of elephants foot, correct for it in Orca only to find that the problem had moved up a few layers and was looking worse than the original elephants foot. Once I realized that the software adjustment wasn’t doing me any good, I was able to start addressing the real problems.
I hope this proves helpful for anyone else who has the same problem.
