Hello all, I am having a very odd issue and figured it’s time to poll some more experienced minds this time. I have been printing for years but have had little experience with ironing until just recently. I am making center caps for a friends of mine’s truck with custom wheels and am using ASA for the print on my X1C. I found ironing settings that worked good from another project I found on maker world and the prints turned out great. For some reason after that I started to dive more into ironing and all of the uses and calibrations. When I went to print the first cap, for some reason I turned the ironing flow down to 12 from 23 which I had used before and I knew worked well. Doing so, I ended up with a poor surface outcome on the first part which was not a big deal because I realized some of the letters were too small so I had to redo the model anyhow. This is what it looked like…
After redoing the model, I printed just the top section just to make sure my original settings of 23 flow and 30 speed would work as they did before and the result I got was nearly perfect…
So I figured I was good to go so I printed a new cap using the good settings and I again have some surface issues…
It is better than the first try but nowhere near as good as my test print using the same settings. the only thing I can think of that is different was that the test part was very close to the build plate. Maybe only 10 or so layers at .02 height and the full cap puts the top surface in question at layer 284 at .02 height. None of the ironing calibrations go that high so I am not sure if that can affect the result or not.
Some info about the print. It is being printed at 100% infill and that top flat surface is 5mm thick so there should be no issues of a not truly flat surface because of too little infill or not enough top layers.
Sorry for the lengthy post but I am now scratching my head trying to figure this out and do not want to waste another almost 8 hour print and almost 175g of ASA going through trial and error. I appreciate any input or questions.