Thought I might get some input from those here more experienced on these materials and settings. I previously spent months last year on an ender driving myself mad dialing in the settings on calibration. I was really excited grabbing my Bambu P1S since it ran flawless out of the box so far on PLA. I’ve been printing with Bambu PLA and my extra Hatchbox PLA for the last few weeks and it’s been printing perfectly fine. Calibration cubes and benchy’s were perfect as I could see.
I recently picked up a few spools of Bambu PETG and tried to run the same initial tests to verify. I printed two benchy’s in PETG and noticed the off edge line printing which I’m not sure what’s going on here. The PLA benchy in green were fully smooth with no misaligned areas of print I could easily notice, but the benchy I printed in white PETG both had the same shifted offset as it printed.
I’m using just the default Bambu Studio, Bambu PETG, settings without changing anything yet at the moment. I’m currently also double checking the filament and putting them into a drybox for another test tonight.
I plan to test some of the settings suggested here. I know from my last run slowing down the volumetric speed in the filament settings helped but plan to do more testings by tweaking some of the parameters highlighted in the post I linked to.
Thanks for the link, I’ll take some time and look through this. I currently already have a drybox this morning and desiccant packs in it also cooking one of my rolls. Going to give it a go tonight with some of these other profile settings on the filament and see if those on top of dialing the speed and other settings back a bit might help.
Printing petg on the Bambu, it a rite of passage for many of us. Orca slicer calibration prints for petg on p1s, 0.6 nozzle. I never had that problem on my old ender 3. I remembered all I did there was to raise the temps and print as pla- so I copied the pla cooling fan settings to the petg profile in bambu studio, and got an instant improvement.
I’m using the basic BBL PETG profile and my benchy is pretty much perfect aside from a lack of cooling on the bow (as PETG and high fans is not always ideal). That’s not to say their PETG is really good, because I think its only OK, but I’m not seeing a problem with that.
PETG in general, is super sticky and tends to stick to the nozzle and cause collisions (which would cause shifts). But what you’re seeing isn’t a “Shift”, its more of a extrusion issue. A shift would continue to be offset everywhere. But your faults are oddly localized and don’t really make sense to me. But I do see the problem is occurring in an area where the PETG profile will stretch its legs and speed up on a benchy. Mine gets matte in that area, so that tells me the speed goes up and the extrusion flow gets tested.
Are you using the stock BBL PETG profile? Or is it modified? Either way… I would suggest lowering the max flow rate (by 15%, or between 10-12mm3).
I was using the stock bambu petg profile right off the bambu studio. Everything was more or less great on PLA so far so I thought their filament and their profile would be fine.
I’ll check again on those settings and speed tonight. But yes I can see what you’re saying. Both benchy were uniformly odd in how they had issues in the same areas consistently. Hopefully drying the filament out a bit extra and trying out some other speed and temperature settings will help on the profile.
Looks like you went through the rounds there also lol. Hopefully I can get mine sorted out. Some of those tests you had there seem useful. I’ll look them up.
Hi All, could use some further input here. I went through the petg filament drying and other settings. Honestly I think my issue here isn’t necessarily the petg. I wasn’t having any first layer issues. It doesn’t seem to be a wet filament issue. And rather uniquely every print has this offset I’m starting to notice more.
So see those lines on the PETG. I’m referencing the curved lines not the common horizontal benchy hull line. I see that there’s that curved offset.
So I decided to print another Benchy in PLA to verify if I’m having a problem consistently here. Which surprisingly I am seeing it also in this black PLA benchy I printed last evening. There is still a curve here which is somewhat light, but still there.
So this consistency here makes me believe that I might have something offset here that’s not the filament settings as I originally was perceiving it to be. It just appears that this issue is more pronounced in the petg when I print compared to the PLA which is almost mostly glossed over thin.
Anyone maybe familiar with what this might relate to I’m quite at a loss here. I have had this printer maybe 3 weeks and it’s sat on a sturdy table with nothing else affecting it.
I think if you go through the orca slicer test pieces, one by one, you may be able to isolate the problem. When you are messing around with profiles, it is pretty easy to use the wrong one whe you revert to a generic pla, say, or save a setting that you didn’t intend. I find the wording of much of the settings is ambiguous.
I was able to figure it out this morning it seems. At least the part where I can get rid of the jagged curve on the hull.
I dialed back the outer wall speed to match the average overhang speed. Some of the linked and other reading materials I’ve looked at mention that the offset can also cause other issues beyond the basic horizontal benchy hull line. So gave that a shot first in black PLA this morning. Then printed another in my white petg with similar dial back.
Thanks for all the help everyone, I got pointed in the right direction easier with the input here.
Ended up with these PETG settings. Turns out in my case it was more the speed issue on the smaller area overhangs rather than a drying or temperature issue.
I’m very sure that this strange line is the slow down on overhangs. that would fit the shape well. The glossy surface is an indicator for slower speed, while the matte surface points towards too high speed. PETG should be very glossy. I have read somewhere, that the matte surface comes with weak layer adhesion and in general subpar material properties.
In addition , I would say that pressure advance is not dialled in. One of those lines looks overextruded while the other one is underextruded. So if K factor is too small, then the sudden deceleration from vertical wall to overhang would produce the raised part while the acceleration from overhang to vertical causes underextrusion. If K factor is to high , the it overcompensates and it is the other way round.
I did a lot of tests with printspeed, layertime and fans. My result was that at speeds above 120 mm/s i wasn’t able to achieve consistent quality (glossy surface throughout). My filament profile ended up surprisingly close to the Bambu profile with a little bit of aux fan. So I have a new set of print options with all speeds set to 100. I fully support what @Lexi wrote above.
So, my advice: double check pressure advance and try again at no speed higher than 120.
Haha, posted at the same time Great you got that figured out! One advice from my post above: I would also reduce the other speeds. You don’t see inner walls and infill but i think the high speed weakens those and you probably want the inner structures just as strong. And have a look at pressure advance settings!
Lol yeah. I actually spent the next few days tuning the settings on the Bambu PETG. Then was able to get a really smooth benchy and printed the first base part of a Riser for the printer.
Both of these came out super uniform and smooth actually for the most part.
But… I also ran out of the black PETG so ended up buying a few spools of Sunlu I found on Amazon.
I ended up spending a day and a half tuning the settings based on the original findings from this post to try to get something more efficient. I was able to get the benchy mostly fine, but the hull doesn’t look as smooth as the other one. I’m thinking it’s due to the increased cooling I added since I also increased the volumetric to 20 to speed things up which cut down a very nice 25-40% time for me. This part I think I’m still trying to decide if it was worth it or if I’ll go back and dial things a bit down on the outside wall again while keeping the higher volumetric and cooling. It’s all smooth to the touch, just looks like the lines are not fully straight uniform like the other slower bambu petg I just did before this. There’s also a slight stringing which is minor and I’ve since adjusted the z settings more to dial that down already.
What bugged me was the temperature tower part actually and bridging. I actually printed numerous temp towers which I still ended up deciding I like the hotter temps as the overhangs on the sides and the stringing was the least on those parts. The only issue was the “bridging” parts.
The interesting part is that the first outermost layer of the bridge area is as shown here on the overhang wall side and the internal is lit as bridge. Now on the actual print, the overhang wall lines are actually perfectly fine and straight, but the bridge parts are sagging. I also printed another bridge test, but it seems like I need to adjust my bridge/overhang settings more somehow.
With the current speed and settings, I’m actually already printing the next part of the riser. This is turning out smooth and well so far, but from the shine it’s looking very unusual also here if anyone has any thoughts on this.
I mean considering it’s just the visual shine, the print is smooth so far and looking good print wise from what I can tell at first glance. This is with the part printing at 15h and 39m with these setting changes.
It was a big jump from the first part I printed with my older settings from this post. I think those were influenced because of the very slow outer wall speed. That part at the time took over a day.
I’m currently running the following process and filament settings for the petg at .2mm quality if anyone sees any areas they think I can improve on these.
Funny, I received one roll of Sunlu clear PETG yesterday that I want to test as low budget option
I have settled on quite different print options than you. I reduced print temperature to 240°C, because that improved stringing while still maintaining a glossy surface. In the flow rate test, I detected first issues at 21mm³/s, so I have set it to 18, so very similar.
I use far less fan and lower speeds, but well possible, that I’m loosing print speed without need.
But my first impression of the Sunlu PETG is quite positive.
I read somewhere that it withstands less heat than others. I thought that I could just compare the glass transition temperatures in the datasheet. But such a thing doesn’t seem to exist for Sunlu But for high tenp applications, i will go with PC anyway so not a big deal for me.
Still it seems to print nice, is maybe a bit less complicated than the bambuLab and costs a fraction. I think I will try two other slightly higher priced brands, but it is a hot contender for my goto PETG.
Will you stick to it or do you continue the search?
Yeah that’s quite interesting. I actually will end up dialing a few things down to see if I can have better wall lines on the tests. I actually kept the temps high because I wanted to run it quicker and was reading about cooling so after turning those up it seemed like the walls on the test prints were flatter/smoother, though not as linearly glossy like the initial pictures I mentioned comparing to with the bambu PETG.
Honestly for personal use I may stick to Sunlu since I’m really not getting any major print imperfections outside some of the minute stuff at this point after figuring out most of the settings that seem to work in my current speed etc. Though I’m going to also have to see if I can improve it later tonight when the printer frees up. I want to see if the wall settings at slower will smooth the gloss out more cleanly.
That was the one thing I liked on the Bambu PETG spool I used before the Sunlu in the last week. Those settings were far slower, but was I think quite clean for the most part on the final gloss patterns. I actually got the Sunlu because I needed 2 more rolls to finish my riser. And saw it was so cheap on Amazon. I previously saw it bulk from china also I think around 10 bucks or so per spool so that kind of made it a quick pick so I can see if it’s actually usable. Which seems like it is more or less. At the very least I’m not seeing the big issues I see a lot of troubleshoots have.
The fact that my temp tower tests had good first overhang wall lines for the bridge, then the “bridge” part between those lines actually sagged kind of bugs me where I need to tweak on that still.
What’s your normal PETG brand? This was actually the first for me on PETG this week. Normally I was going with PLA on Bambu and Hatchbox brands which always worked great.
Actually if anyone reads this post. I’m having another benchy dilemma here.
I switched to Orca Slicer this past week from Bambu Studio since it has more features. It’s been overall working great. I was just doing a comparison though and noticed that the same benchy 3mf profile I was using to test is showing different layer speeds. I set both filament and process presets to the same.
The Bambu Studio speed layers seem fully uniform here.
I think that’s what is causing the one imperfection I still see on my Benchy tests in the last few prints. The first say 10-20 layers of the bottom front hull has a slight warp here on the area it curves.
I’m right in the middle of trying different brands.
I only have my X1 since december and had very little spare time. Before that I had an Ultimaker 2+ for like 10 years. But that was a different world in many regards. For nice results I printed PLA at 40 mm/s and PETG at 30 mm/s.
I used mainly Extrudr and dasFilament, two european brands. As Ultimaker uses 2,85mm filament, I had and still have to completely restock and I use the chance to make a new choice. I first looked for PLA and PC, because I didn’t get any good results with PETG. For PLA I’m super happy with PolyMaker Polyterra. For PC I have settled on also Polymaker, their PolyMax PC.
For PETG, I want to try again Extrudr and maybe also Polymaker. but probably I will buy one roll of Extrudr to test and then decide between that and the Sunlu. Extrudr is on crazy sale a few times in the year and is very well respected.
PETG is the material I mainly use for bigger functional parts, so here the price advantage really kicks in.
I would love to have the test equipment that Stephan from CNC Kitchen has at hand to also compare physical strength. But probably at 95% of prints I do, I’m so far away from the physical limits of the material, that it probably doesn’t matter.
One filament brand that I still want try is AOMEI, they have some interesting CF filled filaments (e.g. PC-CF) at a great price.
I still have a sealed roll of ColorFabb VarioShore waiting for testing. That one looks super exciting.
And a sealed roll of BASF PAHT-CF, that I picked up very cheap. That one will have to wait until I have a need for its properties.
Yeah I’m looking to get some time to play with CF and also TPU materials later on. Oh and actually yeah I also do have a roll of polyterra pla lying around in the open roll bin I have. That worked fine like hatchbox for me on the pla prints. It seemed like most of the PLA rolls I tried so far or had from my previous printer worked fine on Bambu. Which was why these PETG differences are actually quite annoying imo.
Current goal actually with the PETG is so I can print some printer accessories that can hold up a bit better than PLA would in areas such as temps.
I actually just finished my part 2 of the riser so just started a benchy test again with bambu studio. I’m really confused and curious why Bambu Studio and Orca is giving me differences with the speeds on the initial orca layers. When both filament and process preset is the same. I can’t seem to figure out what extra Orca setting is causing that.
On another note with that part 2 of the riser after taking it out for a closer look it seems I may have to dial down things a good bit perhaps. Observing a lot of holes on the surface actually. I guess the volumetric may be too much and/or the wall/overhang speeds maybe?
First part in bambu petg on right. Second part in Sunlu petg on left.
First part with Bambu Petg at the initial dial in slower speeds I had earlier were much cleaner actually. Though, at the old settings the part took 28 hours instead of the new sunlu setting punching it out at around 15ish hours.
I actually have a quarter of the Bambu roll left, so I’m going to print some tests and check between the older and new settings. And see which I can dial in works best.
Honestly I might end up going back to Bambu Studio if I can’t figure out the difference in variation speed on Orca with the benchy layer differences.
LOL, I just did a Benchy with the stock profile, moderately dried BBL PETG, at normal speeds and it came out better than I expected. Only issue was the cooling on the bow and a slight sheen change where the slicer sped the print up. Otherwise, it was pretty pristine. Considering I’ve done ZERO tuning, can’t say that I’m unhappy about anything. This is surprising because I remember far worse printing the first few prints of this exact roll of material that was dried only once about 3 months ago where it sat in my AMS since (not that it’s displaying any signs of moisture).
Great you got that figured out! One advice from my post above: I would also reduce the other speeds. You don’t see inner walls and infill but i think the high speed weakens those and you probably want the inner structures just as strong. And have a look at pressure advance settings!
