I’ve been doing a lot of video-watching on the various types of calibration tests available in Orca Slicer. From what I understand, the most important ones to tune are Flow Rate, Pressure Advance, Retraction, and Temperature. Not sure if the order of operations is important, but while many people cover how to run the various tests, nobody really covers the order.
Based on my understanding of what these tests do, and what a few people have said in videos, I’ve come up with this order:
Flow Rate (Passes 1 and 2)
Temperature (Tower)
Pressure Advance (Tower or Pattern)
Retraction
I was curious what others do (if they even bother) or if it even matters. Thank you!
typically I do temperature first. The order of the others doesn’t matter at all.
What i also test is maximum extrusion volume. You should do that after temperature.
And you might want to test the shrinking and compensate that in the material profile if best geometric accuracy is important for you. Please don’t use a calibration cube if you decide to test that but find a model instead that is as large as possible in X and Y. I have bought the CaliFlower from Vector 3D to support the channel but there are also free alternatives available. Just make sure that it measures both insides and outside dimensions to compensate extrusion width.
I only tweak retractions if I experience problems during regular printing. So far that wasn’t necessary, I did the retraction test once and reduced retraction. But after some prints, I reverted to default. Only for TPU, you probably need increased retraction. I haven’t printed that yet on my Bambu.
I think what is missing in Orca is a test for cooling. Especially PETG can be very sensitive to cooling, so one should also dial in the fan speeds. Unfortunately Orca doesn’t have a test for that available.
I currently run an experiment with different PETG brands and test the tensile strength at different print speeds and with different cooling. It is amazing how much the filaments differ in behaviour, optimal settings and stability.
Definitely agree that temperature should be first. PA and Flow Rate are indeed independent from each other. However, I do think retraction order matters in that it should be the last step. I never actually change that value because the defaults work well for me. I only had an issue with stringing once, but that’s because I hadn’t calibrated PA and Flow. Once those got calibrated the print was flawless.
Initially, I always calibrated flow and pressure advance for each filament, but not anymore. For most filaments, I just use the Generic PLA profile, and it looks good enough.
If I calibrate for filament, I will only calibrate
Flow (only the second pass, setting the filament flow to 100%. Almost all filaments were below 100%, so I don’t see a reason to waste filament)
Pressure Advance
I don’t calibrate retractions, because if there is stringing, it is because of wet filament. I haven’t yet found a filament where I had to deviate from the default retraction settings.
In Orca, when you go to filament settings, in the first tab there is a shrinkage parameter (don’t know the exact name). Here you should enter the actual size in %. E.g. if the dimension should be 150mm and the actual measurement is 149mm, you have to enter 99.33.
In the Califlower (or my version) I take several measurements (X, Y, inside, outside) and take the sum of all measurements and divide it by the sum of all ideal values.
