I’ve had a P1S for a couple weeks now, and apart from printing a few items off of makerworld that turned out well, I have not been overly impressed with the surface quality of my prints. I have tuned flow various times and have tried multipliers from 1.01 down to .93, and experience the same surface roughness. I have been printing on an Ender 3 for about 2 years now and am very familiar with how to slice for that machine in Cura. I know my overhang settings are causing what looks like overextrusion on the holes, but I am unsure how to fix it. I print parts with complex overhangs on the Ender but I have never used the slow down for overhangs feature because I typically print slow, although this same defect appears when using it on the Ender. I have attached photos of the print defects as well as some grabs from Orca. What I do not understand is why I seemingly cannot achieve a smooth surface finish on these parts. regardless of extrusion multiplier, there always seems to be noticeable variations in the outer wall finish at the very least. On the part pictured, smoothness is not as much of an issue than what appears to be inconsistent cooling, creating what looks to be a striped banding effect, with some layers looking shinier than others. I retensioned belts thinking it was a tension issue. Apart from doing flow calibrations and slicer changes I have not done much troubleshooting. The latest extrusion multiplier I have landed on is .93, and for the part pictured, if not effected by the slow down for overhang setting, it seems like must surface variation is related to cooling and not extrusion.
Start with a default profile and nothing you already modified a dozen of times.
Set the correct flow ration using a printed vase mode object.
Measure the wall thickness you get.
Divide the set factor for the ratio, e.g. the default 0.98 by the measure wall thickness.
Now multiply the result with the set wall thickness of the slicer, e.g. 0.42.
Repeat the print with the new value to confirm a match.
Now do the K-factor calibration.
Pick the number next to the line that looks best, no blob, no gaps, smooth surface at the marker spot.
The other test with the card like result and angled lines needs attention in this kink - you want the best looking one.
Now you can do a max flow rate test if speed is what you are after.
I however suggest to try something like a temperature tower or all in one model first.
Find the lowest temp where the layers still bond properly, then the highest temp where fine details won’t turn into mush.
Use a value somewhere in the middle.
What did you just do?
You actually made sure all vital parameters for the filament are correct.
NOW you can try the print again at default speeds and IF it still turns out bad you can address the real issues causing you a headache.
If it is rather big print try the test on a smaller scale with just 2 walls loops and lightning infill.
I don’t often see that kind of print artifact in PLA, but it can be a common occurance in PETG prints. Here’s a link for a thread which did an extensive analysis of the problem in PETG:
Maybe you can adapt the solution provided there for PETG and leverage it to find the corresponding solution in PLA. If you are successful, please report back the solution for PLA so that everyone can benefit.
Noticed your Quality settings tab seems ro be completely unchnaged. Definitely suggest playing around with those settings asthose are what determine final/top layer quality.
Especially for smooth prints, at the top of your screen you should look at the “hamburger icon” while you have your object selected, slide the slider to adaptive, and click adaptive to apply it to your object, that one setting completely changed the quality of my prints 10 fold.
Lmao I would never use adaptive layer height pretty much for anything I cared about visually. This is 100% a slicing issue being made worse by the slow down for overhang feature being enabled. It’s never done a good job in my experience on my Ender, and the same issues seem present with the Bambu. Much better to keep everything consistent. I’m printing my part in half scale and with that setting disabled the surface finish is basically fully consistent from what I can see.
Layer height wouldn’t have an effect on the difference in surface finish varying from shiny to matte. That’s going to come down to speed temp and cooling.
For this… I would make sure the printer is updated and re-do the calibration (in the printer’s internal menus). Also… I’d just use the default Generic PLA profile. That’s a ton of ringing. If that doesn’t help check out the Wiki for belt tightening. Might help.
I agree with you completely. I had an a1 that was recalled for the heated bed. That produced much better prints than the p1s. Kind of disappointed I “upgraded” to the p1s honestly. I should’ve waited for the non-fire hazard a1.
Honestly I think it has to do with he flow calibration sensor. I thought it was just a gimmick but it honestly must have worked wonders. The a1 prints were cleaner, more uniform layer stacking, and more dimensionally accurate.
It sucks they’ve got a machine for almost double the price without the functionality.
I got the file to print with a smooth surface finish all the way up by disabling slow down for overhangs and slow down speed for better cooling. The trade-off is that I am running all speeds at 50mm/s. It is still cutting 8 hours of print time off of my Ender 3 most likely in the form of travel speeds and acceleration but at least I can get it to produce a print that looks like a $600 printer made it. In my limited experience with this machine, I experienced massive overextrusion when running stock profiles, to the point that the outer wall looked like snakeskin. I don’t think it is possible to speedmax and qualitymax at the same time with this machine. If you want flawless prints I guess you just have to slow everything way down. I cut a couple thousand off of acceleration values all the way around as well. I never bought this printer to print fast but I thought I was well within reason asking it to print PLA at 80mm/s and expect a flawless print. I guess the only thing left that I could try would be to put the printer on a paver, although it is already on a stable surface. Just a little disheartened to see the same exact print defects that my Ender produces when the slow down feature is enabled. It’s a physics limitation that clearly hasn’t been overcome fully.
I suggest you do what @user_3026326371 suggested. You gotta start over, something is jacked up. It looks like you are at a fairly low layer height, so you should be able to easily hit speeds of 200mm/s for PLA.
You’re right; the banding doesn’t have to do with the extrusion multiplier, but with a combination of layer time and cooling.
Have you lowered any of the acceleration values? That would explain the ghosting on the holes.
I came from an Ender 3 too and I had to learn to embrace this new realm of speed. Max possible speed is dependent on your filaments Max Flowrate. After slicing a model, double check the actual speeds your slicer is going to be printing at.
Welcome to the Bambu world. I’ve had my Bambu for over four months. Mine has been nothing but a headache. I went from an ender 5 to a prusa Mk3s to a Bambu. The ender and prusa I had for several years each. I wish I would never have wasted my money on this machine. I exclusively print petg, no matter what I can’t get prusa quality. I always dry my filament. It’s like I’ve went back to my ender days of tweaking just to try and get prints to finish, and get decent quality. I’ve been in the forums and seen so many people with issues, and never able to find a solution. I really hope you are able to work your problems out, and share what you found out. I will say turning down all the speeds to about half has helped, or at least turning down max volumetric speed to about 6. Any overhangs look terrible, and even any support material normally fails. Also I’ve had the worst luck with the Bambu filament. I already had Prusament and it prints much better. There may be other filaments that are even better than that, but that’s another thing that has helped some for me.
haha I tried PLA, PLA+ and PETG. Now the only way I can get a decent print is by setting 265 and 65. Best print so far. I don’t think printing st that level is a good thing.
Let me know.
I don’t know if anyone noticed that the printing temps for our machines are considerably higher that what is used on traditional printers that crawl to the finish at around 60mm per second tops.
PLA I print on the P1S at over 200mm/s and at around 250 degrees Celsius requires a temp of UNDER 200 degrees on my vintage Prusa…
Trying to print at 250 would result in the filament coming out basically as steam LOL
What we see in our slicer and on the machine is the HOTEND temperature but NOT the temp of the extruded filament !
Like with water from an inline hot water system the outgoing temp is a factor of the temp of the heating element AND the flow rate…
This can be problematic for materials that have a high resistance to heating up and reaching the correct print temp.
These things really turn ugly if you want to print at thin layers for best details while having a model that requires the printer to slow down big time for certain areas.
You then end with a perfect model that totally fails where it really matters.
In the old days the solution always was to first find the LOWEST print speed and LOWEST print temp to produce the best results.
Then you worked your way up to find the fastest and highest temp that worked for machine.
Based on that and the required print setting for a model you selected the best matching temp and speeds.
Today and with modern high speed slicers people tend to ignore basics physics
The faster you print or the thicker the nozzle/layers the higher the print temp needs to be in order to still print at the same high speed.
On the other hand, really thin layers at high speeds might also need a higher temp while also requiring a lower temps for slow speed areas.
Before you start messing up the basic profiles completely try to calibrate ALL aspects of the filament and machine - even for the Bambu spools with a chip…
Especially if stepped up from a slow machine or jumped right into fast printing with your first purchase getting the basics right is the best way to avoid the frustration at a later point.
And like it or not: It does make sense to do this initial calibration for a new type of filament for ALL the layer heights you intent to use…
If you started prototyping your new creation in draft mode at maximum layer height you can rest assured that the calibration you performed for this won’t work at 0.16mm, let alone lower layer heights.
And something you calibrated right away for 0.08mm will not produce a clean and proper print at the default 0.2mm.
Always keep in mind that plastic isn’t a fixed thing once heated up…
