New to 3D printing...

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pjr
Posts: 692
Joined: 05 May 2015, 10:27
Location: Kamnik, Slovenia

New to 3D printing...

Post by pjr »

Hi Guys

I recently acquired an Afinibot (Chinese version of Prusa i3) and have been having fun printing things I never thought possible.

I have so far mainly been using Cura as it was recommended by the seller. Its OK, simple to use and does what is intended, except I have continuously noticed various oddities in the prints.

So a few days ago, I found KISSlicer, downloaded the latest Beta and started playing around with it.

I almost gave up with it a few times as I found it very difficult to understand and not particularly intuitive, but what I did manage to print was much better quality than the output from Cura and most of those oddities were not present. The sizes of the prints are also more accurate than those printed with Cura.

However, I have noticed a few things and I wonder if there are plans to do anything about them.

1. I installed the latest Beta (1.5.B1), but Help/About shows version 1.4.5.10. I am confused...

2. Printing the first layer at a higher temperature - at the end of the first layer, everything stops while cooling which leaves a blob where the extruder stops. Is it possible to move the extruder to 0,0 (X,Y) while waiting?

3. Is it possible to set the height of the top/bottom layers and width of the sides to different settings? The height of the top/bottom layers should be a multiple of the layer thickness and the width of the sides should be a multiple of the extrusion width; these are not always compatible.

4. The extruder is not "homed" at the start of the print. My first test print tried to start off the bed... (inserted gcode to fix)

5. The bed temperature is not automatically set at start or turned off at end. (again, inserted gcode to fix)

6. Bridging - when printing a long arch (which printed perfectly with Cura) loads of unattached strings were left under the arch.

7. Printing time - KISSlicer appears to produce much more efficient print code than Cura, yet the prints take significantly longer (up to twice as long). I can't figure this one out...

8. RAM Warning - when slicing one item, I had a warning stating that up to 11GB RAM would be used (warning set to 6GB). Actual usage was just over 2GB, but the message was very worrying. And there's not a lot of choice if I want the model sliced!

At the moment, I quite like KISSlicer, but I don't have the confidence in it to print a larger/more time-consuming item, particularly because of the bridge issues.

Peter
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