I’m a bit stumped, and am looking for advice. I have an extremely old (Circa 2015) Craftbot Plus. It’s hardly any parts of the original unit, kept alive with custom parts out of just spite. I use cura as my slicer, and it works fine for my needs. Recently, my kids have wanted to print custom keycaps. This is a difficult FDM print to begin with, and my old hardware isn’t doing me any favors; it might be impossible. That being said, my prints turn out good, except for the tiny details in the actual stem. The picture is attached of various settings; I’ve tried a ton of stuff. I can share a cura profile, but the gist is I’m printing in PLA and have experimented with 195-210 degrees, .1mm layer height, line widths between .175-.2mm, various speeds, minimum speed and minimum layer duration, I’ve disabled ironing, and I’ve played with retraction. I’m kind of stumped, and am wondering if anyone has things I should try.

  • iocase@lemmy.zipEnglish
    3·
    14 days ago

    Could it be your hot end dwelling over top of this section like a helicopter parent? My experience trying to print FDM minis for DnD (didn’t and still down own a resin printer) was small layer heights and lots of detail = lots of indirect heating that causes drooping, smearing, warping and lots of other fun stuff… i actually had better experience using a coarser layer height even if the final mini didn’t look as fine detailed. At least it didn’t look fucked up.

    I don’t use Cura but my instinct would be trying a coarser layer height to see what happens. In prusa you can set a dynamic layer height depending on part geometry. Straight walled simple parts print really fast while it slows down and thins out layers around detailed areas. You can of course tweak the output yourself so you aren’t forced to use the dynamic z layer’s guess on where it needs to go thin.

    • surfrock66@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      14 days ago

      I have settings that I thought would mitigate that, but I don’t think it’s working right? I was going for “print the layer at normal speed, then go off to the corner for a while and wait” but I don’t think that’s working; it was minimum speed, minimum layer time, and lift head.

      • iocase@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        14 days ago

        Well if you figure out a solution make sure to edit your post to let us all know!