Poor surface finish

[oliof]

Somewhat aside, this article is interesting: Investigating the effect of fabrication temperature on mechanical properties of fused deposition modeling parts using X-ray computed tomography. It is about experiments printing with PLA between 180C and 260C, and shows that PLA can benefit from being printed at temperatures as high as 260, leading to higher density, lower internal porosity and improved interlayer adhesion, making for stronger parts.

Of course you need a hotend that can do this and probably appropriate cooling setup (or print parts slow enough that they can cool down by themselves). But it certainly is not only possible but art times a good idea to print PLA at elevated temperatures.

[jens55]

@oliof interesting ......

I am packing it in for now. The more I try to figure out why the speed that is being called for is 81 mm/sec when the slicer is set to 200 mm/sec, the more I am screwing things up.
The first print was perfect (other than slow), now about 3/4 of the tube is perfect and 1/4 has terrible layer alignment. That and some early moves that are not related to the layer issue now make really weird noises.

[jens55]

Well crap ..... minimum layer time was set at 3 seconds and I guess that the layers tried to print faster than that ..... dropped it down to 1 second and it is running nicely at the set speed of 100 mm/sec.
Odd though that increasing the speed factor allowed the speed to go higher .... I guess because the minium layer time is enforced in the slicer and the speed factor setting is strictly on the printer.
It appeared though that adjusting the speed factor did not seem to change the extruder speed as increasing the speed resulted in under extrusion. Very odd ....

[jens55]

Apparently as of RRF 31. speed factor does not affect extrusion speed. I am not sure why this was changed from the earlier versions of RRF where speed factor modified all speed settings including extruder speed.

[mrehorstdmd]

@jens55 a low jerk setting could be limiting speed on a circular print.

[jens55]

@mrehorstdmd, the speed limiting happened because of layer time. Once that was reduced from 3 sec to 1 sec, the speed was back up to what it was set to in Cura.
In the past I had set jerk to 25 but as it turns out, I had turned off jerk control for some reason or another.

[infiniteloop]

@jens55 said in Poor surface finish:

Apparently as of RRF 31. speed factor does not affect extrusion speed.

I'm still at 3.3b4, but up to that version, I can assure that extrusion follows the speed factor precisely. Apparently, with your apparatus, other factors play a role

[jens55]

@infiniteloop, well that is quite possible since making assumptions and jumping to conclusions is one of my fav past-times
It just seemed to fit - proper extrusion at the original speed, increase 'speed factor' and see under extrusion. While it is possible that I was pushing the extruder too much, in this case I was going relatively slow and would not have thought that I was anywhere near the hot end limit.

[rjenkinsgb]

@jens55 From the way the defects occur at similar locations in different consecutive layers, I suspect something mechanically sticking - eg a bit of grit in a bearing or a dry bearing.

That could explain the blob or melting effect, if the nozzle momentarily pauses them jumps past that spot once the drive system has wound up enough??

[dc42]

@jens55 said in Poor surface finish:

Apparently as of RRF 31. speed factor does not affect extrusion speed. I am not sure why this was changed from the earlier versions of RRF where speed factor modified all speed settings including extruder speed.

Speed factor is not applied to extruder-only moves, i.e. retraction, reprime, filament loading and unloading.

[jens55]

@dc42, thanks for the clarification !

[mrehorstdmd]

@rjenkinsgb I had an extruder motor cable failure several years ago when I used a too small bend radius in a drag chain. It would cause the extruder to cut out momentarily at specific XY locations in the prints. It took a while to figure out what was happening. The wires had fractured inside their own insulation, the result of being bent too many times.