So I’ve swapped my 0.4mm hot ends out for standard flow 0.6mm hot ends and started working on getting the 0.24mm profile and a pla profile dialed in. I’ll say, the profiles need a little bit of work. I’ll move onto PETG after I figure out pla.
So far what I’ve done on the print profile:
Quality tab - Resolution: 0.008
Sparse infill line width: 0.8
Accelerations - Normal printing: 3200
Travel: 5000
Initial layer travel: 2000
Outer wall: 2000
Top surface: 1000
Others tab - Reduce infill retraction: Disabled
Filament profile for eSun PLA+:
Calibrate flow rate and flow dynamics manually
Ran temp tower & confirmed 220°c was the proper temp.
Increased cooling Min layer time from 6s to 8s.
Changed cooling overhang threshold from 50% to 10%
Disabled aux fan
Changed retraction length from 1.4mm to 0.8mm
I was getting a lot of stringing of which I never really had an issue before with using a 0.6mm nozzle. The filament was dried at 50°c for 18 hours, so I’m pretty sure it wasn’t moisture, but I’m going to run the filament through the dryer again. A quick retraction test model showed me that lowering the distance down to 0.8mm made a big improvement. This might be this particular filament, further testing on other filaments in the future will tell. Overall, it seems as if the stringing is the biggest issue so far with the 0.6 hot ends.
Left is 0.8mm and right is stock 1.4mm. I stopped the right one half way through.
I really wish Bambu would unlock the in depth filament calibration menu for Bambu printers (the same one orca has). It’s there already and available to other manufacturers printers, it’s just locked away for Bambu printers. These tests would be much easier and quicker.
Anyway, just wanted to put out there what I’ve done so far. I’ll update as I move further and onto other filaments. If you’ve swapped in 0.6mm hot ends, please share your tips, tricks, and experiences to getting better quality prints.
It’s honestly a bit sad that so many profiles have issues or are not correctly tuned upon launch. I feel like it wouldn’t really take them that long with just a few people going through basic filament. I bet they could get a pretty extensive list of profiles dialed in with a small group of people, a dozen printers, and 2 weeks of time
To be fair, 98% of people are going to stick with the 0.4 nozzle. But I agree, they should spend some time and give us some good profiles for the other nozzle sizes so they can work as effortless as the 0.4 profiles do. I didn’t think I’d have to mess with retraction at all, I never had to with my x1-c. It’s still early though, maybe they’ll surprise us sooner or later.
I think it would depend upon the filament and “ooziness”. I’m betting they set it to correspond with their filament. PLA+ could have any number of non-pla plastics mixed in.
Thanks for the heads up! I used to enjoy my custom 1.2mm nozzles I had drilled on my previous custom printer. Once you start adding more filament though in diameter things get tricky from brand to brand.
I agree. I did some further testing with the same brand pla+, just green instead of red, and well the 1.2mm retraction works just fine for that one and when lowered to 0.8mm it got all stringy.
I’m hoping PETG and pet are more consistent. If I have to do multiple retraction tests for every roll of filament I use to avoid stringing, I might give up and go back to the 0.4 lol.
That may be true for most printers, but I think the H2D will have a much higher percentage of users (such as myself) who bought it to print engineering materials for mechanical parts, where a 0.6mm nozzle is precise enough and gives a welcome speed increase.
From my own observations, I think this is a fair assumption.
Anecdotally, I wouldn’t have purchased the H2D to print dust collectors/trinkets. I did buy it to print strong functional parts. .6 nozzle is fantastic for that.
One recent example that H2D made possible printing PLA as support interface for PETG:
Not sure what benchmarks are out there beyond the towers as I haven’t done any in years, but I always found watching where the seam is, pay attention to the uniformness of the last-laid point of contact vs the first-laid points. If the last laid is kinda caved in, too much re, if the first laid point is too blobby too much de.
I proposed a feature update post for the lidar on the x1c as even if 2d perspective, could give a fair degree of accuracy to retraction settings based on looking at last-layer-point vs first-layer-point but then it devolved into some argument about logistics of verbiage on the lidar… lol
