OK, I think I may already be on more or less the same page as you are then. I recently made the switch to orca slicer (as should everyone, as I don’t see any downside to it), and running the 3 built-in calibration tests you mentioned did help. I was hoping you might have had some kind of grand strategy regarding the other hundred options, because getting those optimal seems like it could be very time and material cost intensive because the number of potential combinations explodes.
So far, the best advice I’ve read on the topic of the most impactful other PETG settings was written by @djeZo888 in his two posts:
and
He wrote in the first post that it took him “weeks of messing around with settings, going over half a dozen of different brand of filaments” to boil it down to the essential few settings covered in the second post.
A lot of the people who replied after his posts said the advice worked out well for them. I also think it made a big improvement for me too, so I reference it here in case it can help anyone else also.
I think I must have read most of what folk had posted on petg and Bambu slicer. None seem to work in my case. I realised that cooling and speed were the main settings wrt bridging, but other settings effect it to. Starting from any of the presets, bambu, bambu generic, esun, polyterra, just didn’t work for me, although by printing at a lower temp got something nearer. Being more used to Cura, I was struggling to find what temperature settings and fan settings needed altering, and where that was done. Starting from any petg profile, just seemed not to work, but generic pla seems to set everything to more appropriate values for petg then the inbuilt petg profiles. I’m just checking the temperature tower settings via the x-touch at the moment, starting from 260, (on a different petg filament, the original printed fine with this tower) since I was not certain if the pla default temperaturtes restricted the gcode values. There seems to be a ton of gcode ‘comments?’ at the beginning of the file, which may or may not be interpreted as commands.
PLA, ABS printed fine with the default settings. I expect, but could confirm, that petg composition varies considerably between manufacturers, and one profile does not fit all. For a single manufacturer it can vary between batches and colours, but probably not so much.
printed using bambu generic pla profile, with ‘0.3mm standard @bbl x1c 0.6 nozzle’ profile. This was from the unaltered profiles, so I’ve yet to do some fine tuning, but this is good enough for me. Temp of 255 looks about the best, which is what the manufacture stated. All the petg profiles gave terrible results, but obviously with a lot of alterations could be turned into pla profiles…
Wow, thank you! This is already looking way better on the temp tower than any PETG profile I’ve tried. It’s a great starting point for sure.
EDIT: I also noticed that the Bambu PETG Basic profile states it’s for a 0.8mm nozzle when the 0.6mm nozzle is selected for the printer profile. Using the generic PETG profile seems to be working much better for 0.6mm nozzle than the Bambu profile, but there’s some still some tweaks to do such as decreasing the fan cooling and such.
I think the easiest strarting place, is to use the generic petg settings, but for the cooling, copy the cooling for pla. then tune the values with the orca calibrations.
Do you ever find that you need to re-calibrate because you have changed the type of build plate you’re using (e.g. changing from textured plate to engineering plate)? Or does the same calibration hold, regardless of build plate?
consider the factor you’ve changed and how it could affect the calibration, swapping the plate probably wont affect what’s coming out of the nozzle, swapping the nozzle for a new one of the same size will though. however you might want to consider bed temps, starting temps and first layer cooling etc.
As for a general question from me, has anyone figured out a way to get feedback from the printer regarding the values of the dynamic flow calibration? I realize that theyre variable and that they’d change as soon as you change nozzle temp but if you could get that info back you’d probably be able to adjust the two calibration passes to be faster.
I was thinking the same, in exactly those terms, but “probably” is different than “definitely”," which is why I’m asking if it ever makes a difference.
Looking at the available OrcaSlicer filament calibrations, I don’t see anything that would be affected by the type of build plate. They are all about controlling extrusion, not what happens to the plastic after it leaves the nozzle.
