Need help with a warping problem. You know how parts, when printed FLAT on the plate, can warp/curl-up the edges sometimes? How can that SAME EXACT thing happen when a part is printed VERTICALLY (as shown – i.e. NOT FLAT)?
Below is a 3d rendering of where these 3x parts meet. You can see it’s supposed to be flawless - no gap, nothing curling up. 2nd pic is how mine is - you can see the blue slide (of this nerf blaster pistol) curls up/warps away from the dark gray grip below - same happens on the opposite end of the part - not shown in pics).
The angles also don’t even match up and there’s a gap there (between the blue, the red, and the gray parts - where it should match-up with nearly zero gap there).
This was printed with a properly dried, calibrated for Pressure Advance and Flow Rate, PLA+ filament (which I’ve used a TON in the past to great effect). “0.16 High Quality” setting on my Bambu X1C (about 900 hours on it, so new-ish). Speed was obscenely slow (dropped all values in OrcaSlicer to around 50%, and ALSO manually set the printer to “Silent” 50% speed during the actual print as well!). Any help is greatly appreciated - thank you!
Mhmm. The last pic shows a drastic improvement versus pic 1. Not an elimination of warping, but a drastic reduction. I would guess that the main beneficial effect would be from the reduced print speed (and hence reduced heat input per a given time, resulting in a more even cool down) rather than the ~50° (?) angle in the second picture. From the angle alone, I’d expect a more sinusoidal improvement ratio, so nowhere near where you managed to get to between pic 1 and pic 4.
Warping is usually the symptom of rapid, uneven cooling. So keep the chamber warm, reduce cooling (but that will affect overhang and bridge quality and may not be an option), try to avoid drafts (AUX fan or, in very rare cases Chamber fan drawing cold air from the poop chute) and reduce heat input (not by nozzle temp as this will affect layer bonding, but by local layer height [adaptive layers, manual tuning by right/left clicking on the layer heigth bar] and (sorry) travel speeds).
You will also want to use brims or mouse ears (Orca 2.0). That only adresses secondary effects, but it is somewhat effective for cases like the one shown in pic 1.
You will probably not be able to completely avoid warping. But hopefully you can get it down to more acceptable levels.
If you can not get to levels fulfilling your high standards, I am afraid you may need to compensate for manufacturing distortions at the part design stage. That is a painful process where you need to measure parts you consider defective, and then alter the design geometry in the opposite direction by the gap amount. Rinse and repeat until requirements are met. But: Do not change print parameters (or even environmental conditions) once that process started. All bets are off in that case.
Thanks for the reply @EnoTheThracian !
Pic 1 was a picture I stole from the internet (complete with their title graphic on the bottom) to show the type or warping I’m talking about - i.e. what I’m used to when printing something horizontally - NOT vertical like this one is (which is where the quandary lies).
I’m currently on hour 5 of the 8-hour re-print of this, in a higher quality filament (Polymaker PolyLite PRO PLA), and using my normal settings.
The two things different I did for this part, since it’s massive and has a lot of bridges (or at least a lot of empty space inside it), is I turned the speeds down WAY low like I said (which is supposed to help), and I also bumped up the auxiliary fan just a tad (I think it was)… so you very well might be onto something about the cooling (which I did that because it’s ALSO supposed to help on parts like this!). Since it’s PLA, and it’s now pretty much summer weather (like 87º here today…) I ALWAYS print with the front door cracked 2", and top glass is raised maybe 1". Maybe I’ll shut the door and see if that helps as well…
So let me report back when my re-print of this is finished. If that comes out better, I’ll use those SAME EXACT settings on the original blue Inland PLA+ and see if that fixes it (then will re-print that front red block as well… as that was just all kinds of messy with the massive amount of holes in it). That will/might also tell me if the filament is part of the issue, or if it’s solely on my settings. Thanks again!
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I’m keeping my thumbs pressed. With PLA, I never had a clog even during summer (~35°C here). So a closed door may help a bit.
Another point to take care of is filament humidity. Especially with new filament as that can arrive fully soaked (fresh from a cooling bath, out of storage during the monsoon season,…). The inherent humidity affects thermal capacitance which may have an effect. So to be sure and to easily eliminate a possible root cause, you may want to dry it.
PS: Actually, and contrary to my initial advise, I remember tackling a local warping/curling issue by increasing the Aux fan as well. I had noticed that it would suck warmer air from just underneath the heat bed to the active, troublesome layers at that height.
The act of plastic shrinking doesn’t just happen to the bottom surface, it happens everywhere and the more dense a section is the more likely it will shrink.
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