Hey there, welcome into my studio and welcome back to my build on this Voron 0.2 printer. Now, the build is basically done, right? So, I'll put a link to the playlist up in the corner of this video if you want to go back and see how we got to where we are.
But we built this thing from an LDO kit. It is, you know, obviously complete and working now. We've also done a bunch of tuning on the hardware side of it to make sure that, you know, all the motors are working and that everything is set correctly. We've done a bunch of configuration within Clipper to make sure that our extruder is extruding the right amount of plastic, that we don't have any skew on our X and Y axes, all of that stuff. So that's all in previous episodes on this playlist.
If you're interested, you can go back and check those things out. And I would recommend as well, if you're going to do what we do today, which is tuning a filament profile for Orca Slicer, you want to make sure that your printer is at least dialed in and printing at a good level of quality before you go and do this, right? You want these test prints that we're going to do today during this calibration process. to be coming out looking really good and you're just going to use little details in the print that you're looking for to decide what values we're going to set for some of these calibrated values. But if your prints aren't looking good, if your test prints that you use for calibration aren't looking you know kind of generally good, there's probably something else that you're going to need to go back and look at with your printer.
So make sure your printer is in a good working condition and then you can follow along with the steps that we're going to do today. So for me today I have what is basically a brand new role of Elegoo Matte PLA filament. This is what we're going to be using for test prints with this printer going forward as we tweak and fine-tune the settings to try to get the highest quality and detail that we possibly can out of it, and that's been the goal of this series from the very beginning. But before we do that, I want to, like I said, dial in a default sort of baseline set of settings for this particular filament.
And so... We're going to use Orca Slicer's calibration tools mostly for that, and then a couple of other things at the end. And this is the process that I go through for any type of new filament that I get in my collection that I'm going to print with regularly.
So having said all of that, the process today is probably going to take a while. For me filming this, it's probably going to take most of the day. I'm going to have to do a test print and then wait for it to finish, and some of these take a little while to finish. Then we'll read the results, we'll punch in some values. we'll do the next test print, and so on.
The video itself is probably also going to be a bit long. I thought about breaking this up into separate videos for each kind of subtopic within the calibration process, but instead I've decided to put it in one video. I'll put chapter markings in the description so you can jump around as needed, but I would say if you're following this procedure and trying to do this yourself, the order of these steps does matter.
Like the results that we get that we punch in for some of our earlier calibrations will affect what we see. in the test prints later on. And so if you are jumping around just be aware that the the order that I do these things in is the order that I recommend to get what I think are probably the best results for when you're calibrating a new filament.
And so with that all said let's just go ahead and open up OrcaSlicer and jump right into it. All right so I've got OrcaSlicer loaded up here and at least for the first part for the majority of our calibration here we're going to just use tools that are built into OrcaSlicer. So you're going to need to get really familiar with this calibration menu up here at the top of OrcaSlicer and in general we're going to go through these calibration tools from the top to the bottom.
So they've I think put them in the menu in the order that is that makes the most sense to do them in. At the bottom of this menu though is a tutorial link and so if you click on this it'll bring up a lot of really good documentation to show you to tell you about these different tests and show you what you're looking for when you're reading the results. So if you want more information than I cover here in this video definitely give that tutorial a look that's a good place to get a lot of additional information. What I typically do is I want to start out with a good kind of baseline for our filament profile and so what I will do is I'll pull down the filament profiles over here and down under system presets because I loaded this Voron 0.2 printer, along with the preset for the printer, came a bunch of system presets for filaments.
And so, typically what you want to do is start out with a generic version of whatever kind of filament that you're doing. So in this example, we're using PLA. So I'm going to choose Voron Generic PLA here. And we're going to click the little edit button next to that to go ahead and go in here and make a couple of changes and name our filament settings so that we don't get confused in the future. Just looking through here, you know, this is PLA filament.
You could change the vendor name if you wanted to. This is just for information. This doesn't obviously affect how it prints, but this is Elegoo branded PLA here that we're using.
So I'll go ahead and type that in there. It's not soluble. It's not a support material.
You could change its color if you want. I typically do not tune separate groups of settings for different colors within the same filament family. So in this case for like the Elegoo matte PLA, I will, you know, tune one set of settings for all of that.
And I assume that different colors within that family will print roughly the same. Now it is true that adding the different dyes and things they do to change the colors of the filament does ever so slightly sometimes change how it prints. But in general, I don't, I don't worry about color differences. The filament diameter should be already set correctly. And then all the rest of these defaults, we just want to leave them as they are for now.
And these will be what we're tuning. So things like flow ratio and pressure advance and stuff like that are things that we're going to be tuning as we go through the steps Throughout the rest of this process in this video. We do want to go down here I typically look at this and I set the recommended nozzle temp mins and maxes to whatever is on the spool So usually printed on your you know spool of filament That'll be there will be some print range and it turns out that for this elegoo filament The range is listed as 190 to 230. So the generic PLA setting already had those in there but if those were different on my spool, I would change these here.
And then, if it's a type of filament that requires a heated chamber, and PLA does not, but if this was like ABS or something like that, I would probably set this for ABS to something like 50 or 55, because my print start macro will then, when we're running our test prints, it has some hooks in there that will look at this chamber temperature and will let the bed heater wait for the chamber temperature to get up to whatever... temp you specify here before it starts printing. So if you're curious how that works, my Voron config is always listed in the description of all of these videos. So you can look down there at my print start macro and kind of see how this gets passed through from the slicer into the clipper, you know, setup, and then it gets executed as part of the print start macro.
There's a wait for the chamber temp. But in this case, again, for PLA, we don't need to worry about that because we don't want a heated chamber at all. In fact, I have the lid up and the door open.
on my little Voron V0 here for these test prints because we want good airflow around our print nozzle as we're printing PLA. The rest of this stuff we're going to tune as we go along. The bed temp, usually I just go with whatever's on the spool. Again, 60 degrees is just fine for that. So really all we've changed here is the name of the vendor, but in doing that it allows us to hit the save button up here and it will ask us for a a new name for our preset.
So now we're changing this from a system preset over to a user preset, and we can give it whatever name we want. And so this is going to be for me, Elegoo mat PLA. And then this way, this will show up in our list, you'll see it's selected over here. And now it's in my list of other user presets. And so as we're going through the rest of these tests, we'll make sure we're always using this as the one that we're saving over as we go and we make adjustments.
So with all of that kind of groundwork laid, now we're ready to actually start our calibration prints. And the first thing I'm going to do is go up here to the first item on the calibration menu list, and that is temperature. And so we'll get our dialog here when we choose that. And if we choose our filament type, it usually produces some sane defaults.
And again, probably what you want to do is just make this range be whatever is listed on your filament spool, which again, for us, this is correct. It's 190 to 230 listed on that spool of filament. And so I'm just gonna go ahead and hit okay. So what this is gonna do is in five degree increments, it's gonna create this stack of this test print. And they're all labeled on the side.
If I can get this to look nice here in the 3D view. So you can see 230, 225, 220. So it starts at the hottest temperature as it down by the bed and it gets cooler as it goes up. So we'll go ahead and slice this and I'll send this over to the printer. This one's gonna take a while to print because it's tall.
It's doing a fairly large range of temps. I could probably cut this down a little to save time, but we'll just go with it the way that it's set up here. And again, with my smaller nozzle size, I'm using a 0.25 millimeter nozzle on this particular printer, and I'm printing at 0.1 millimeter layer heights.
And so all of those factors combined is going to cause this to take quite a bit of time to print, but we're not going to worry about that. We can make it go faster potentially in the future. for testing for calibrating filament, I want to make sure that I'm being as careful as possible.
So we'll go ahead and let this take the almost three hours that it says it's going to take. I'll go ahead and send this over to the printer and then we'll take a look at it when it gets done printing. Okay so our temperature tower is done printing and I'll try to get you the best close-up view I possibly can of this thing here.
You can see, and I mentioned this earlier in the video, this came out looking quite good. Like even from the hottest temperatures here up to the Coolest in general it's a good-looking print and so all that we're really looking for here when I look at something like this To figure out the exact temperature that we want to use I'm looking at little details within the print and I'll try to point those out here as we go along. So the first thing that I'm always looking at are these overhangs here on this temperature tower and actually on this particular one they all came out looking really good. So sometimes on the hotter temps down here what you'll see is that there's some drooping or sagging on this overhang that it's not nice and smooth and sharp and the fact that all of them look good is I think a testament to the dragon burner's cooling. So we replaced our mini stealth burner on this printer.
with a dragon burner print head and it's got much better cooling and so this is yeah this is looking really good as far as overhangs go so there's nothing there that's going to tell us what temperature that we want to use the next thing i'm looking at is over here this little kind of cone tower pillar thing that prints inside of this opening and i'm looking around the outside of this for stringing so you can see down here at the hottest temperature at 230 we have quite a bit of stringing between this and then the walls of that opening that it's inside of And again up here at the higher or the lower temps at the higher parts of the tower, we have some stringing up there as well. Somewhere in the middle, there's usually a spot where there's not nearly as much stringing. And so that for me is right around this like 215, 220 area where those little cone shaped pillars look really good as far as their level of quality.
They're not like bent or warped in any sort of way and they have minimal stringing around them. So from that point of view, I like kind of the 220, 215, maybe even the 225, although that does have a bit more of the stringing in it that I'm seeing here. And so that's one thing I'm looking at.
The next thing I'm looking at is this long overhang up here. And so it's going to be hard to get this on camera, but if you look up underneath here, you can see how much droop and separation you're getting between kind of that first layer that tries to bridge this overhang and then everything else above it. And as I look...
On this particular test print, there's actually not much difference between those bridges either from the very highest temperature down here to the very lowest up here. There's maybe just the tiniest touch of kind of starting to not look so good up in these top two sections up here, but most of these generally look the same again to me. And I think, again, that's because, you know, our printhead has very, very good cooling.
So there's not really much to see there on this particular print. And then the other thing I like to do is flip this over and look at the backside. So usually between kind of the transition on each one of these segments of the tower, when we go from this long section here to this where this cutout is and we have this shorter section here, you might see a visible sort of transition.
And I'm pointing at it right here with my tweezers on this particular one because this one is pretty obvious. Actually, all the ones above it are as well. And so that's an indication that probably We're printing at too low of a temperature and our layers aren't adhering to one another quite perfectly Because we're not printing hot enough And so as you'll notice as you go down here you start to see this looks much more Sort of homogeneous like it's one piece instead of having this kind of obvious transition in between and so for me It's kind of these bottom three here look the best from that point of view And so taking all of that into account and flipping this back over I think that this third one up, which is the 220, is for me the best one here.
Now, the other thing you can do, and only do this once you're done kind of inspecting this and making sure that you like how it looks, is you can actually test the layer adhesion at the different temperatures by trying to break it. And so I'm not sure this is going to work with this PLA. We'll see how much force I have to actually apply to this thing. But yes, so like between the 195, 200, it broke quite easily there.
Let's see about further down. So between the 205 and 210, we got a little bit of breakage, but what you should see that as you go further down the tower, so higher in temps, that you're getting better adhesion between those different layers. Let's actually move that out of the way. And I should not be able to break this nearly as easily. And it's, yeah, it's taking quite a bit of force and it's not really breaking at all.
So This works with PLA with stronger filaments like ABS. You may not at any temp that you print it at, you may not be able to break it like that with your hand. So don't like force it and hurt your hand trying to do that. But that's a good also indication that like these tempers here were too low because our parts are not going to be as strong. So again, the 220 for me is the, I think, is the answer here for our particular case for this particular filament.
And so what I'm going to do is jump back over to Orca Slicer. We have here the print we did, the tower that we made, that we sent to the printer, and we can go and edit our filament settings. And again, make sure you have the right one selected, this profile that we created and named and saved a little while ago.
And we can go here for our print temperature and for the first layer and all other layers We want to set it to be 220 so I'll just set those two values there and then we'll come up here and save it and just save it over our setting with The same name and now we're good to go with our temperature. So what's next? We can go up to calibration and flow rate is our second one.
You actually have to be over here on the prepare tab for these calibration menu options to be active. So we're going to do our flow rate test which comes in two passes so it's actually two test prints. Again whenever you change your calibration prints here you always want to say don't save my settings and if it asks you about discarding presets or settings that it's changed you can discard all of those as well.
We talked about that I think in a previous episode in this series. So here's our flow calibration print and here's our first problem that we get to with our very small printer and that is this test print is just ever so slightly too big to fit on our print bed and so before we can print this thing we've got to resolve that. So there's a few things we could do here. One is these little separate chips which are all printed at different flow rates are separate objects and so we could split these across multiple print beds and print them in two different passes, two different groups. We could optionally choose to remove some of them.
So the way that this test print works is that this zero in the middle is printing at whatever the default flow rate is currently set at for our filament in our settings here. So if we go and look in this in the settings, you can see the flow ratio is 0.98. That was just what came from our generic PLA setting that we loaded. And so this zero will print at that 0.98 flow rate. And then the 5, 10, 15, and 20 are all printing at 5%, 10%, 15%, and 20% higher than that flow rate.
And the minus ones are printing at minus 5%, you know, 10%, 15%, and 20% lower than that flow rate. And so we could choose to take these highest, you know, the furthest away from the zero, the 20 and the minus 20 and maybe like the minus 15. And we could remove those. I think there are nine of these here.
I think only six will fit on this plate. So we would have to remove three of these chips to print them at this size on the plate here. The other option that we have is we could just scale them down.
And so I think that that's what I'm going to do here. So I'm going to select them all. And I'm going to go into the scale here. We don't want to have uniform scale turned on because we don't want to change the Z height of these things as they print.
The thickness matters because it's a certain number of layers. It matters that... OrcaSlicer calculates the thickness of these as a multiple of the layer height that it's set here for this print.
And so we don't want to mess with that, but we can change the x and y. And so if we go to the scale here and we make sure that we don't have uniform scale ticked, and then we can change this to maybe like 90 percent, and we'll change the y as well to 90 percent so that we've edited them both in the same, you know, by the same amount. That way we have The same aspect ratio to these rectangles as we had before, they're just smaller and the thickness has not changed.
And so now we can go ahead and slice this plate and send this over to the printer and it should be good to go. It is seven layers thick which is what you want. So just so you know when you're doing one of these flow calibration test prints, OrcaSlicer always sets it up so that you're going to print seven layers.
So that's a good way if you're resizing it and you should only ever have to do this. if you're using a very small print bed like what we're using here just because they don't fit. Otherwise, I would recommend, you know, don't mess with the dimensions of these things. Just let them print in the way that they got generated. But again, ours is a special case because it's a small printer and so that's what we've got to do.
But it should work just fine. We've got our seven layers there and that's good to go. So I'm going to send this over to the printer, get it printing, and then we'll take a look at the results when it's done.
And just like that, our first pass. Flow rate test is done. I've chosen here not to take these little chips off of the build plate.
I've just grabbed the whole build plate off the printer because I didn't want to disturb them, and I think it'll be easier to hold this up and point some things out for you guys here. I'm going to try my best to get good in-focus camera shots here, but it is potentially going to be tricky. So let's talk about the extremes here first because they're pretty obvious, right?
So this is the overextrusion extreme. This is 20%. higher than the flow rate that was dialed in or that was the default for our filament to start with.
And you can see the top surface here is incredibly over-extruded. It's super bumpy. This very narrow... Nozzle this smaller nozzle size I think does quite a good job actually of accentuating these Kind of extreme cases so the extreme over extrusion is you know pretty obvious here Even on the 15 and a bit on the 10 as well you can see the evidence of you know We've got extra plastic here. It's a bit bumpy on the top because of the extra plastic all right Let's jump down here to the minus 20 if I can get it to focus here.
Yeah, there we go So on this one you can see the gaps if you look very closely you can see the gaps between the angled extrusions, right? So that top layer extruded in this direction and you can see all of those little gaps between them And so that's your indication of under extrusion. It's the same thing with the 15 and a little bit with the 10 as well You can see those those diagonal sort of gaps in that top layer there as well And so those are the obvious, you know way over extruded up here, way under extruded down here, and some gradations in between. Now, right at the zero, it's actually looking pretty good.
We've got a nice smooth top surface. One thing I wanted to point out, because we have not yet tuned pressure advance, when you're looking at these flow rate tests, you want to kind of force yourself to ignore the edges. So like here on the five percent higher extrusion, you can see there's a bit of... extra ridges and bumps here around the edges of this print on the edges of the rectangle here.
Those will smooth out when we tune pressure advance later on for the filament. And so really with these, you're looking out here in the middle. So for me, this 5% overextruded and the zero are pretty good as far as being nice and smooth here in the middle. You can actually use your finger or your fingernail as well to sort of feel for the how smooth that you know, that top layer is turning out to be. The 5% under extruded here is ever so slightly under extruded.
If you look in a few spots, especially out here in the middle, I can start to see those gaps between the extrusions, between the individual passes of the print head on this top layer. And so for me, the zero and the 5% over are good. The zero is ever so slightly over extruded.
It looks like to me, I'm just seeing a few little, um, you know, artifacts. Again, ignore the edges, but out here in the middle I'm seeing a little bit of overextrusion. And so what you choose here for this first pass for your kind of final answer actually does depend on what happens next.
And so it's good to know what's about to happen next, so let's go ahead and look ahead at that. If I jump back over here to my prepare tab in Orca slicer and we go ahead and we try to generate a pass to flow ratio test and again we discard all of these changes and we see what it got what got generated again i'm going to have to shrink this down for actual printing on our very small print bed but if you understand how these numbers work based on what we just saw with our positive and negative numbers on our first pass test you'll see what it generates for the second pass is a zero and then only negative numbers so what this is going to do for our second pass is it's going to let us dial in with much more detail the you know, the exact flow rate because it's only going by 1% at a time, but it's only ever decreasing the flow rate. So what we want to pick for this first pass result is a flow rate that looks a little high to us because that's going to be the baseline, the zero for that next test. And we're only going to check flow rates that go down from there. And so for me, I'm okay with this zero here because it does look a little bit overextruded to me.
And maybe I would choose... minus five if that was my only choice and this was my final pass and then I was going to go on printing. But I know that if I pick this zero and then we do the second pass of our flow test, we'll get a bunch of new values.
We'll get the minus one, two, three, and four that are sort of in between these two chips right now that we don't get to see. We'll get those in our second pass. So what I'm going to do is since I'm choosing zero, that means no change.
So there's no change that I need to make in my settings here for this filament. for the first pass. And so there's nothing that I need to change here.
We're going to stick with the 0.98 flow rate here. And I'm going to go ahead and I'll resize this one in the same way that I did with the first pass, just so that it fits on our build plate. I'll send that over to the printer. We'll get that printed and we'll take a look.
And we should have a much finer detailed version looking at, especially I'm interested in the minus one, two, and three here, because I think probably one of those is going to be our final good result. So I'll get this sent over to the printer. We'll wait another half hour or so. That's about how long this first one took. And then we'll take a look at that result.
Okay. So here we have Hot off the printer, actually not that hot, slightly warm off the printer. Our second pass of our flow rate test, and what we were most interested in from that last one, so our zero, if we pulled out the zero chip from our first test print, those should look nearly identical because we didn't change our flow rate from pass one to pass two.
So this zero should be the same as that other zero. And again, we've talked about this in the previous section. So... What we're looking for is under extrusion only in this case because we've only gone with flow ratios that are less than what we started with. So down here at the extremes at the minus 9, you can see some of that same under extrusion evidence, the gaps between the diagonal top layer passes there.
You can see those pretty obviously. I can see them here on the 9, 8, 7 for sure. The 6 definitely, the 5 as well.
And again, this minus five should look the same as the minus five that we had before. And the ones that I was most interested in are the ones between the zero and the minus five. And so as I'm looking here at the minus four, if I tilt this in just the right angle so the light catches it, maybe you can see there are those under extrusion gaps showing up there as well.
You can kind of see some horizontal banding as well in it because of the layer that's underneath, which was printed with horizontal lines. And so that's definitely out. The minus three again has a little tiny bit of under extrusion. I really do like the minus two and the minus one the best. And so what I'm looking for here is kind of for that final decision.
I'm looking for, I'm looking at this with a lot of different angles. I'm trying to shine light on it from a lot of different angles. And actually my studio lighting that I use here at the desk for filming, I turn this on even when I'm not filming. If I'm looking at a print like this, because it does a good job of...
really illuminating any imperfections. And so if I turn this a lot of different ways, the idea is I'm looking for that sort of flat smooth surface in both of these, no matter what angle I'm looking at it from. And I'm seeing, at least here with my eyes, I'm not sure what the camera's picking up, but with my eyes I'm seeing, I think I like the minus one a little bit better. It looks a little bit more of like a homogeneous solid top layer. Whereas the minus two, sometimes in certain angles of lighting, I'll start to see some little sort of ridges or patterns in it that indicate to me that it's not totally perfect.
So, yeah. So the minus one for me is the final answer here. Again, the zero does look ever so slightly overextruded. It has a nice smooth finish in a few spots. And again, we're ignoring the edges because pressure advance comes later.
but I do like the minus one just a little bit better. And so given that is my final decision, what we'll do is we'll come back here to our Orca slicer, and we will, since we're doing minus one, it's 1% smaller than whatever the flow rate was that we had before. So our flow ratio here is 0.98, and so we want 1% smaller than that.
So I'll grab my calculator here real quick, and we'll type in the 0.98, which is our current value. And then we'll multiply that by 0.99 since we're going 1% smaller. So if we were doing 3% smaller, we'd do 0.97 and so on.
In the phase one test, if you were doing like 5% larger, you'd multiply your original value by 1.05. So we're multiplying that out and we get 0.9702. I will just go ahead and round that to 0.97 because it's close enough here.
So my final answer for flow ratio for this filament is going to be 0.97. And we'll go ahead and save that over our pre-saved preset that we had before. And we are good to go with our flow ratio.
So now we'll go on to the next step in the process, which is pressure advance. And we've done this before in a previous episode when we were tuning the kind of the global pressure advance for the whole machine. But we'll do it again here and I'll kind of go through it quickly.
We do have a direct drive extruder, so we choose that. I prefer the pattern style of pressure advance calibration. There are a few other options as well.
And again, if you read the tutorial link under the calibration menu up here, you can find out about those. For me, I like the pattern. It prints quick and it's easy to read.
We'll start with a pressure advance value of 0. We'll end with 0.08 and we'll go by 0.005 increments. Those are all the defaults. So I'm just basically choosing direct drive and pattern and taking the defaults and hitting OK. Again, we'll discard any changes that our previous calibration prints have tried to make for us.
And then you get this cube, which is not what's going to print. We'll slice it and I'll show you what's going to print. So we have this is going to be our test print.
It's nicely labeled over here on the side, so we'll be able to read. our values when we're done and what we're looking at is this corner here. We want it to be as sharp of a corner as possible without any separation between the three different lines that are printed here for each of the corners. So we don't want to see any separation between the lines of filament here but we also don't want to see an extra little bump or bulge. So down here at the low values of pressure advance we're expecting a little bit of extra filament to be extruded so we'll get a little bulge here.
Down here at the higher values of pressure advance there won't be enough filament extruded. So we'll see little gaps here, and somewhere in the middle will be our correct value. So again, this is all sliced up, ready to go. This one's much quicker. It's only gonna take about seven minutes to print.
So I'll go ahead and send that over to the printer, and then we'll take a look at the result when it's done. Okay, so let's take a look at the results here for our pressure advanced test print. And this one is gonna require super close.
Good focus from our camera. So if you remember what I said when we were looking for here is up here at the top, the high values, I will move the tweezers out of the way so they don't mess with the focus, but up there at the top of the print, the top of the screen, we should be seeing a little bit of extra plastic, so a little bulb on the corner there where our extruder, where our printhead turns 90 degrees. And so we are seeing that up there.
And then down here at the bottom of the print, down at this end down here, we should be seeing little gaps and we do see you know right here on the 0.08 for sure all three of those separate extrusions have a little gap right there at the corner i'm also seeing gaps you know all the way up to about right there there's a very tiny gap there and then and the bulbs you know they start actually kind of disappearing as we get right around this area so somewhere right here in the middle kind of the lower middle right the larger middle numbers for me is actually the best value here. So I'm looking again down here, I'm seeing gaps on all four of those, maybe a tiny gap there, maybe that one's okay. I'm going to err on the side of caution and jump up to this one here.
So if I follow this line up, it's 0.05 is the value that I'm seeing that I like. Now, It's interesting, that is actually a little bit higher than what I typically like to have as a pressure advance value. But again, every filament is different, so that's probably the value that we need.
So we're going to go with 0.05 here, and editing this is super easy. Right back in OrcaSlicer, we just go to our profile for our filament, we edit that again, we make sure that pressure advance is turned on, so you want to check this checkbox, enable pressure advance. And then for the value, you just put in whatever value you read off of your test print. So 0.05 here.
We'll go ahead and save this, and we'll hit OK. Now, I mentioned when we were calibrating the flow ratio just a little while ago that the edges of those rectangles that were printed for our flow ratio are affected by this pressure of advanced value, right? So we could actually at this point, if you wanted to, you could go back and you could go maybe... generate pass two of your flow rate again and then go in and just delete all of these negative values so we just have our zero and put this in the middle of your bed and you could go ahead and print this and you should see around the edges of this rectangle some of those extra little ridges that we had seen on our flow uh calibration tests they should be smoothed out now now that we've got pressure advanced dialed in i'm not going to do that here And I don't necessarily recommend that you do, but if you're curious to see kind of what pressure advance does at the edges there when the extruder is going, when the printhead's going back and forth and the extruder slows down at the edges now because we've added pressure advance, and then it speeds up back out of the edges, we should see less of that ridging around the outside of this. So that's something you can try if you want to on your own.
For us, we're going to move on to whatever's next up here on our calibration menu. And that is... the retraction test. Now I will say at this point if you've cal-if you've calibrated temperature, flow rate, and pressure advance for a filament, this is kind of what I think is kind of the basic, you know, the bare minimum. This is, at this point you're good.
If you want to stop and just do some real prints now with this filament, they're going to, they're going to turn out looking really, really good. We're going to go just for the sake of completeness through a couple other things here. So these are, I would have, I would say kind of the intermediate level things you can do.
And so retraction is the first one of those and I'll explain why I don't think this is necessary in a minute here But we'll start just with yeah zero to one millimeter in point one millimeter steps is fine again discard any changes that the Calibration prints have made to your settings and we get these little towers now we calibrated Retraction before and this is why I think for per-filament calibration, retraction is probably not necessary, especially with modern extruders and modern printers. Once you've got a firmware retraction value dialed in, and we did that in the previous episode on this playlist, that's going to always take effect unless we override it, and that's probably good for every single type of filament that you're going to want to print on this printer, unless you're doing some really exotic things, you should be fine and good to go. But just like I said, for the sake of completeness, we'll do this one here. So I'm just going to slice this and I'm going to send it to the printer.
We're looking for any stringing that appears between these two towers. And we should see stringing down at the bottom of the print. And we should see it start to disappear as we have more and more retraction as we go up the print.
And so that's what we're looking for. We'll send it to the printer and then we'll take a look at the results. So here we are with the result of our retraction test print. and I should...
looking at it from the top doesn't help at all, so I should give you guys a view from an angle here, and hopefully I can get the camera to focus on this thing. So a couple of interesting things I noticed with this one, and maybe somebody in the comments can let me know if you've seen this before or not, but we've got a lot of stringing down low for the, you know, the kind of the zero, the 0.1 level of retraction. It gets really good in the middle. And then up here near the top of the print, I don't know if you can see, especially on the tower that's to the left-hand side of this print, there starts to be more stringing and some, like, extra plastic extruded right there by the tower.
And that's an interesting phenomenon that I don't think I've seen happen with other filaments before. But I don't know if you noticed it as well when we did our temperature tower way back at the beginning of this episode today, that as we... Kind of the middle range of temperature was the best as far as stringing went on that temperature test as well. When it started to get too cool, it actually had more stringing. And when it was too hot, which is, you know, you'd expect more stringing when the temp is hotter.
Anyway, there was a middle range with this filament with the temperatures that worked best. It seems like that's also the case with retraction, which is really strange to me. I've never seen this, you know, very high retraction amounts cause extra stringing like this.
So if that's something that you've seen before or you have a reference or information that you'd like me to take a look at that you want to share that's related to that sort of phenomenon, leave that in the comments down below. I'm interested to hear if other people have seen that before. But in any case, for us, the 0.1 level of extrusion down here for me has too much stringing.
And right at 0.2 is where it starts to look really good. And then again, once you get to these higher values, it gets a little wonky, which is strange. And I'm...
I can't quite explain that. So again, if you can explain that, let me know. In the meantime, 0.2 is the correct retraction amount that we want to have.
And I believe we'll go double check on our device tab here on our printer just to make sure what our firmware retraction value is. So for me, that'll be in my settings part of my Clipper config. We set firmware retraction at 0.3 on the printer itself.
So looking again back at this test print, I'm totally okay with that. Like the 0.2, 0.3 level is fine for this test print. So I'm not going to go in here. If you wanted to, you could then go in here to the setting overrides and you can change the retraction length here.
So you click this and you enter whatever value you want. So in our case, it'd be like 0.2. But the 0.3, that's the default for our printer, I'm fine with.
And so I'm just going to leave that alone. And again, that's why I said, you know, this retraction test is... probably unnecessary on a filament tuning level. I prefer it much more at a global printer tuning level and then just set your firmware retraction and clipper and then you're done. But again, if you want to tune it per filament, this is how you would do that.
Next, after this one is completed, we could go and do the orca tolerance test. Let me show you what that looks like here real quick. And that shows, that prints for us.
this little hexagon with different clearances and so this is a separate piece that we can pull out of our print and then fit into these different hexagonal openings to see how close of a tolerance we can get and have it still fit. But before we do that test there's one other test that I want to do that is not built into OrcaSlicer and so let me go get that loaded up and we'll do that one next. All right and here is that test print that I like to do with new rolls of filament that I'm going to print with a lot.
Now this one is a couple things about it. It's not a free STL to download, so I will leave a link in the description. of this video to the place where you can go and purchase this if you would like.
I think it's like five dollars or seven dollars or something like that US. So it's not terribly expensive and it comes with a spreadsheet that we can use to measure and read the results. It's called the calibration flower and what it specifically is for is for making sure that the dimensions of your prints are precisely perfect.
So every type of filament has some small amount of shrinkage. As it cools it'll shrink. And certain filaments like ABS will shrink more than I expect out of this PLA that we're using today. But just to be perfectly dimensionally precise, this is a print that you can use for that.
Now, what you want to do is just load this STL into your slicer with all of your default settings that you will normally be printing with. So again, we have our tuned up Elegoo Matte PLA with the settings that we've done, you know, so far up until this point in this episode. And I've got my standard printing settings, so I'm going to do it my point. 0.1 millimeter layer height with my 0.25 millimeter nozzle and this is how I want to print, you know Actual objects on this printer once we get it going and so you just load it in here The orientation should be good You should see these little embossed arrows on the top of the print Pointing up and to the right to make sure that you're that you've got it oriented correctly But by default it should come in this way and all you need to do is slice this and send it to your printer And then once it's done printing All of these little extra bits that are sticking out here are places where we can line up our digital calipers. So you do need to have a pair of digital calipers and we'll take a bunch of measurements and get precise dimensions of this object and plug it into the spreadsheet that it came with and it will give us some measured values for how much our filament is shrinking.
And then we can adjust for that in our filament profile that we're creating. So again I'm going to slice this. I'm going to send it over to the printer. This one takes a little while to print. And so, and it takes a little bit of extra filament as well because it's a larger object.
So again, optional, kind of an advanced configuration setup if you want to do this. If you care a lot about the dimensionality, the precise dimensionality of your prints that you're printing with your filament, then this is a good thing to do. So yeah, slice this up, I'll send it over to the printer, and I'll show you how we measure the results once it's done printing. Alright, so here we have the result of our calibration flower test print, and...
One thing especially with this print that I would recommend is let it cool naturally, especially if you're printing with a high temp filament, which we did not do here. So this probably doesn't matter so much for us here in this case, but if you're printing in an enclosed printer with a higher temperature in your chamber, you want to make sure that this cools down sort of naturally, that you're not, you know, taking it off of your build plate too soon while it's maybe still attached. You want to let it cool down normally because again we're measuring shrinkage of the filament. So let it cool down under normal conditions until it kind of comes loose from the build plate on its own.
Then you can just lift it off of there and you should be good to go. So what we need to do now is I need to take my digital calipers and I need to do some measurements. And so this, the first measurement we need to take is between my thumb here and my index finger here.
And the way that this is set up, it's real easy to just go ahead and line your calipers up like this. and press them back against those two little nubs that stick out there. And that way we can take a measurement.
And so I'll show you the spreadsheet that this download comes with. And it's got this nice diagram here. And again, you want to use these arrows to orient your print to make sure that you're measuring the correct things. But so one was between those two places there. And what they want you to do is take that reading three times and then put it in these three spots on the spreadsheet.
And you'll see here the The expected readings are 100 millimeters for all of the larger segments and then like from 2 to 2 right here Those are all meant to be 50. So what you're looking for is 100s and 50s everywhere What you're likely to see in real life is more like, you know 99 point something for these larger measurements and maybe 49 point something for these shorter ones because again your print probably Shrunk just a little bit as it was being printed And so what I'm gonna do is go through and fill all of that out on that spreadsheet right now I and then we'll come back and I'll show you what the results look like. All right, so I finished taking those measurements and I've got them all punched in here, and we can see down here under the results section now that we have some shrinkage in both X and Y. Now it's interesting with this filament, and again I haven't done this test a lot on this particular printer either, so this might be an issue with our printer, but I would expect usually for the X and Y shrinkage to be about the same as one another. And you'll see here, you know, our x is about double what our y is, even though they're both very small numbers. And so that might be a measuring error.
I could go back and check my measurements again, but I'm pretty sure I was fairly accurate there. And so there may be... something to look at in the printer itself in the physical configuration of the printer or maybe belt tension or something like that to try to alleviate that difference to try to make those two values closer to one another so i'll be looking at that in the future and i'll report back in a future video if there was anything to do to change related to that but this is uh you know the error that we're getting so these being negative numbers does mean that our part is a little bit smaller than the size that we that we wanted it to be.
And you can see here from my readings, right? They're all in the 99s and 49s instead of, you know, these, the target here was 100, the target here was 50. And so we can tell for sure that this thing is slightly smaller than it needs to be. So if you scroll all the way down to the bottom here, there are some calculations already being done for you to let you know that if you're in Super Slicer or Orca Slicer, that you can put in the shrinkage compensation value for this particular type of filament, you can put the value 99.75. and that will adjust for the amount of shrinkage that we're seeing.
And so what we're going to do is jump back over to OrcaSlicer here and go into our profile for our filament and right here where it says shrinkage, we can put that value that it wanted. So that was 99.75 I believe. Let's go back and check just to make sure. Yes, that was what they requested.
And so if we put that value in there, now when the slicer slices models with this particular filament, it will make them ever so slightly larger to compensate for the fact that we know that it's going to shrink by that you know very small amount which turns out to be like 0.25 of a percent so a quarter of a percent so with that change we can go hit save again to save our filament preset and now we have our shrinkage being compensated for so we should get very dimensionally accurate prints and now at this point we could go back and continue on with the calibration prints that are listed here in the Orca slicer calibration menu. So we had stopped with retraction before, and we took a quick look at the tolerance test, but we never did print this. And so we could now print this, and we should see good fit of this little peg in all of these, maybe down to the 0.05 might fit, and I wouldn't expect 0 to fit with most filaments ever.
But we'll give this a try. I'll go ahead and print this, and we'll take a look at it in a minute. And then the other thing that I'm gonna print is if you right click out here and you say add handy models, there is an Orca Cube.
And I like to print this as kind of my final sanity check once I've done all of my print calibration for a filament. And what this does is it prints something that looks like your standard, maybe Voron Cube or whatever. It's a 20 millimeter on a side cube, I believe. But the difference is with this one, it's got this hole in the bottom and like a screw piece that, prints beside it here that should be able to fit in here and screw right up into there and become flush with the bottom side of this print. And so if you've got your dimensions and your accuracy dialed in just perfectly, this screw when you go to screw it in won't bind.
It'll just screw in there perfectly and end up being perfectly flush with the bottom of the cube. And so that's another one that I like to print. So what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to print both of those.
I'm going to go back here to the tolerance calibration test and we'll go ahead and print this one first and then I'll print that orc cube. And we'll take a look at both of those as a way to sort of finalize and finish out this entire episode on filament tuning. All right, so let's wrap up this calibration session.
These are our final two prints. This is the Orca tolerance test here. And when I took this off the bed, I could already tell that the little hexagon here was starting to come loose and starting to come out.
So we'll just go ahead and poke this out with my tweezers here. And... The idea here is just to see, you know, does it fit in a 0.3 millimeter space, you know, with a 0.3 millimeter gap around the outside edge?
And the answer is yes, it definitely does. Then we can try again with 0.2. No problem.
I'm sure that 0.1 will be fine. Let's try 0.05. Yeah, we can actually push that all the way through no problem as well. And then the zero.
Should fit nice and tightly. It does. There's like almost no gap. I don't know if you can see that.
Let me see if I can get the camera to focus on this. There we go. So yeah, almost no gap there, especially when you look from the underside.
It's really good. You can really tell it, but this actually pushes all the way through as well. So yeah, actually I'm quite impressed there with that tolerance test.
That turned out really, really good. And then this is that Orca cube that I like to print. So... I just like to look at the quality of the cube. All the sides look really, really good.
We do have some ringing here on the X that you can see a bit, this ghosting. Yeah, we'll have to play with input shaper a bit and see if we can calibrate our printer. to get rid of some of that. But everything is so super smooth, especially this top surface.
So that tells me we got our flow ratio dialed in just right and our pressure advanced because all of this is really super smooth to the touch. There's a few little bumps right around the edges of the outline of the Z there. But yeah, at some point we'll do some test prints and I'll hit them with some of the primer that I use for my model kits because that really accentuates any issues or problems with your plastic.
And so I'm curious to see, you know, what a just a fresh print off the printer without any sanding or anything like that Looks like when we hit it with some some primer But on the underside of this thing We have an opening that we should be able to just screw this little screw piece into If I can get it to line up correctly Yeah, and that goes in nice and perfect and if you end up with it straight horizontal there and this perfectly flush with the bottom Of the piece then you know, you've got perfect tolerances on, you know, at least this screw piece, which if you're over extruding, I've had that happen plenty of times on test prints, this thing will bind up, it'll start to go in and it might even bind up like this far out of the print, or it'll get to here and it won't quite go the rest of the way. But yeah, that's looking really, really good. So I'm super happy with the results here and how this has all turned out.
Now, just as a recap. When we started today we did the temperature tower, right, and then we did the flow calibration with these chips. This one's super over extruded. This one I think was one of our slightly under extruded ones.
I saved all these off to the side. So we did those two test prints and then we did this pressure advance test. And for me, again, I think I mentioned this earlier in the video, but this is kind of the bare minimum.
This is the basics. If you do these three and you get your filament dialed in, you should be good to go. So everything else that we did after that with figuring out precise dimensionality using this calibration flower and then some of these tolerance tests and things like that was really kind of extra.
And I wanted to do it because I, again, I'm trying to print with the highest quality and precision I can with this printer. And so I wanted to dial in this filament to be very, very precise. But what I would recommend is that if you're just starting out and you're just trying to tune filament for printing for the first time, these three tests.
The temperature, the flow, and the pressure advance are the three that are the most useful and that is probably sufficient for most of the time. And if you're seeing specific little variations or things that you're not happy about with your prints, you can do some of the other testing that we did later on in the video, kind of the second half of the video, and that's kind of the more advanced stuff. So with that, I think I will declare this very long episode complete.
And so I hope that this was helpful. I hope that you can, you know, come back and refer to this if you need to, if you're calibrating filaments sometime in the future. Jump around, use the different sections as a reminder of the different, you know, procedures and what we can do here with Orca Slicer and all of its built-in calibration tools, which are really good, have been getting better over time. And so in the future, if you're watching this, you know, further into the future, there might be even better calibration tools in Orca Slicer at that time. I imagine there probably will be because they're always improving them.
So, with that I will say thank you for watching. If you've watched all the way to the end, a special thank you to you as well. And I don't do this in all my videos but I would say, especially with this one, because it was very long and it took me a long time to put all this together, if you enjoyed it I would really appreciate hitting the like button down below just so that YouTube knows that it should spread this to more people. So with that I will say thanks again for watching and I hope you have a great day and I will see you next time.