…and whereas when I tried printing with PC it just ended up with an enormous sticky spaghetti clump being carried around the chamber with no actual printing on Bambu, with Orca it actually did a reasonable job, albeit with some warping probably because I wasn’t using any adhesive:
I’m beginning to wonder if my Bambu installation has become corrupted or something. I have had a few crashes when trying to save presets, maybe there is something weird going on with it as it seems a bit hard to believe that default settings for PC and PETG should produce such terrible results vs Orca.
That’s highly unlikely. Orca reads/writes the same JSON files that Studio uses. It’s one thing you need to be mindful of when moving back and forth between the two slicers. If you make a change to one filament profile as an example, that same profile will appear in the other slicer when it loads. If you make a change to the same profile while both slicers are open, the last change will overwrite the other.
The warping that your seeing with PC is very easy to fix. You want to force a brim around the edge of the model. That will fix that problem in a jiffy. The default is set to auto and unfortunately, it often choses incorrectly. You only need outer brim to keep the edges flat while you print.
BTW: As a kindred spirit, the material and models you are printing is what makes up more than 50% of what I use my printer for.
Summary
I also noticed that you’re using the default grid infill. Consider experimenting with one of the other 3 dimensional infills. For thicker models I generally go with either Gyroid or Adaptive cubic. For thinner ones like that, I dent to use triangles or try-hexagon. All of those provide superior strength than the grid layout and in my opinion, I think they look nicer. Also consider increasing the number of top and bottom layers to conceal the infill pattern.
And one final tip. Next time you try to print something, Experiment with 0% infill but increase either the bottom or top layers to the thickness of the model. So if your model is 100 layers thick, don’t be shy bay making both the top and bottom layers 200 thick. The same works for walls too. With PC, the result is amazing, you get a part that is so friggen strong, you could easily print a mallet using this technique. Here’s what those parts look like when printed. This was for a bench vise I was making.
I might also make a recommendation for a great PC filament I found on Amazon that I’ve had some spectacular results with. This brand actually can be found under both the brand HZST3D and CC3D. The two brands tend to stay out of each other’s way on Amazon. HZST3D sells PC and CC3D sells PETG. If you order them, you will get identical boxes and spools with logos being the only distinction between the two.
I think I am going to focus on getting PC right now as that is going to be the best option heat-resistance-wise for my cases. I’ll try the brim option.
That’s interesting about the PC filament you have found; I actually ordered the clear black from BBL by accident, I meant to buy the solid black, but then it turns out Bambu don’t have any in stock so I just started using the clear black to try and get used to it.
I tried 0% infill the other day but it ended up a sticky gooey mess, but maybe that was just the same issue I’ve been having manifesting itself.
So that PC filament you linked to (which seems to be a mixture of PC, PETG + other - this looks to be the same in black on Amazon UK https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B075SXS6NP/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1), on the spec it states printing speed 30 - 90 mm/s…how does that fit with the myriad of BS/Orca settings where the print speeds for the different elements are a lot higher than this? Is it necessary to dial down all those individually or something?
I actually have a spool of their black that I purchased still in the box.
One the basis of speed, I’m afraid I don’t really measure PETG on that basis. My max flow rate looked like this after Calibration using the max flow rate tool in Orca.
Contrast that with Bambu’s default settings. Now in fairness, when I print PETG, it’s solely for parts and I am looking for dimensional accuracy more than speed. Quite often I will print in 50% quiet mode after I have my model completely baked in CAD and ready for final print. So I may not be the best judge of what this filament is useful for if one is looking for speed.
I should also note that I have on hand a spool of Bambu PETG that I’ve used from time to time and it does produce buttery smooth prints but as I sated, there are few use-cases for me personally where good-looking PETG is a requirement.
Sorry I wasn’t clear - I’m not looking for speed at all, just good prints. I was asking whether, having read on the package that it states 30-90 (or 30-60) mm/s, am I supposed to dial down the speeds in BLS/Orca to match these, as they have speeds for various parts of the print way higher than this?
Perfectly happy to leave things printing overnight if I have nice results in the morning.
Eg, these settings in BBS are way above what it states:
Yeah you definitely want to ignore the marketing fluff on the printer box. I learned early on that this is there for window dressing and often will vary greatly from lot to lot even from the same maker.
The same goes true for what’s in the speed section of Bambu. I truly do not know where they get those numbers but someone posted here some time back that the firmware would disregard anything out of scope. Whereas we have no way to prove or disprove that notion, it does make logical sense that the firmware should protect the mechanism from bad settings.
I don’t know my friend, I think you’re getting greedy now Those prints look quite acceptable to me.
However, I understand the pursuit of perfection all too well. If you’re looking for perfect surface, the only way I’ve been able to achieve that was to vary the top layer pattern and to increase the top layers to more than 3. Increasing the thickness of the top layer ensured that any infill pattern was absorbed by the top layer.
What I might recommend is to try out some of the more exotic pattern such as Hilbert which produces a very interesting geometric shape. In fact, do a search on printables under patterns. Someone had some GCode for the bambu I recall seeing that produced sample tiles showing each pattern onto one plate.
I just want a plain surface tbh - the last image was just with solid infill and ironing so trying to figure out the cause of the unintentional patterns. I’ll see how calibration affects things.
Perhaps it the nature of the beast with PETG but with PLA I’ve had some nice smooth surfaces.
I don’t know if one can resign oneself to it just being the nature of PETG in general. I was able to get PLA-like smoothness with the Bambu white PETG but not their black. Also, their white PETG was not nearly as strong as the competitors Clear PETG when I performed a simple strength test.
The point is, and it’s a frustrating one, the formulas used in these filaments vary so greatly, the only certain way to know how a filament will perform unfortunately, is to do exactly what you’re doing, trial and error.
This is just part of the many annoyances I think we all face with the 3D printing industry in general. I used to think that the desktop print industry was rogue with their varied sources and quality of paper, that industry seems like tranquil waters compared to the 3D industry.
I assume one day this just might stabilize but I just don’t see that happening any time soon. There would have to be a sort of revolution and a trusted name like an HP or Epson would have to enter the industry before we saw a shakeout of these startups. Who knows, maybe Prusa might be acquired by one of those companies which would likely help the consumer in having a trusted source purchased by a brand name who equally wants to protect their rep.
Calibration has thrown up some room for change, specifically the flow ratio and pressure advance.
Retraction and temperature inconclusive, I couldn’t really see a tangible advantage in changing from the current setting to another.
Just waiting for Maxflow then I’ll try printing again and see if it’s made any difference.
Have the black PC arriving today so will repeat the process for that!
My experience having come to 3D printing only a few weeks ago is it’s close to plug and play for PLA, at least for this Bambu P1S but since I’ve started experimenting with other filaments it’s clear one must get their hands dirty.
If you need to print things solid (100% infill) then you had better have your flow multiplier calibrated perfectly as there is nowhere for the excess to go.
What is the correct way to print solid - I am doing 0% sparse infill density, and then setting high numbers for the top and bottom shell layers with top and bottom shell thickness set to zero (auto).
That will most probably result in a stronger part as it’s all outlines/walls. I’ll normally use 6 walls and 100% infill for a solid part because I like a plain surface top and bottom. Looking at your last pictures, that’s what I got when using auto flow calibration on the X1. Black ABS was 1.01% and mint green 90%, a huge difference between the 12 colors I did. When I printed black at that value it looked a lot worse than yours. I reprinted it again at 95% and it was perfect, I just use all defaults as I only use Bambu filaments now.
Those prints look quite acceptable to me.
