Since upgradeing my extruder I noticed something in my prints. It wasn’t until I was finishing up a job for a customer that I had a clue what it was. The customer wanted a print that was big, and 100% infill. And the result was a print with a lot of mess on it so that even after vapor smoothing it looked like cottage cheese. (Messed up one on the left, old extruder head one on the right.
I noticed it was well on a chest that I’m designing. The finish was just… messy. And I realized that I had accidentally left the 100% infill setting on this one too. But what was it about 100% infill that was causing the problem?
So I watched a not 100% infill print and discovered that on top fill layers the print head was scraping across the print, and it didn’t matter which print head I was using. So I went to my favorite online resource and asked them what’s up and within a day I had someone point out that my brand new extruder assembly had a larger toothed gear than the old one. And as anyone with a bachelors in math will know, a gear circle will extrude more plastic per rotation. So I had to adjust the feed multiplier rate.
Which meant making a custom profile in Makerware and printing Filament Diameter testers with 100% infill and different feed multiplier rates until the right one was found, which in this case was about 1.10, up from 0.93 of the old ones. Then I went to C:Program FilesMakerBotMakerWareMiracleGrue and edited all the default xml config files with the new multiplier rate because I’ll be darned if I’m going to use custom profiles on every print.
So now, now I’m really back to printing.
Any suggestions on what I should do with my old extruder assembly?
