PLA extrudes while dwelling. . .

[badgerman]

Hi All,

Got the machine going, and I am getting used to printing now. One thing I seem unable to over come is that when on my calibration cube the extruder goes to its start corner and dwells for a split second. In that time a bit of PLA extrudes out making the start point corner consistently bigger. The attached picture shows it fairly well.

I am sure i am overlooking something simple. . . . any help would be great.

Chris

[tom10122]

hmm one thing i can think off is if you y axis belt is loose or if it has alot of backlash I think that might do it

[badgerman]

I had a look and the belts are tight.

There is a definite pause at the start each perimeter and in fact some of the infil lines too.

Confusing. . . . maybe a mach3 setting?

[johnoly99]

Badgerman, what are you using hardware wise to control the extruder. Does your gcode have M03 codes in it? If so, that can cause a dwell

[badgerman]

The PC is a Pentium 4, 3.00GHz with 504Mb RAM. Xp Pro SP3.

No M03 codes i'm afraid.

Do you think my machine is lacking muscle? Would a bit more ram help?

It literally does the skirts and when it moves to the first corner of the cube it hesitates, goes round the 4 sides and when it gets back to start another lap it hesitates again. In that time a bit of PLA comes out and it gets progressively bigger layer by layer. On this print it started the dwell on another corner for the first few layers and then moved to the next corner!

As frustrating as this is, I am still stoked that my first prints are so good!!

[johnoly99]

Do me a favor, attach your gcode file for that print so i can look there dirst, then ill see what it looks like. And yes, for a first print, youre doing really awesome!

[badgerman]

Cheers dude.

Heres the code.

[badgerman]

can i get slicer to put a retract in after every line of g-code?


EDIT: It appears that there is a small dwell when Mach 3 goes between lines of G1 and G0. .. . .

EDIT: I think I have cracked it, I opened the g-code in Mach3 and changed all the G0 to G1. It took a while but now the print is going well. Not sure how to get slicer to stop G0-ing tho . . . . the saga continues!

[tom10122]

I can't help you with slic3r adding the g0 but you can use microsoft word to find and change the code all at the same time , search for g0 then click fnd and replace and replace with g1 and that will change them all good luck

[badgerman]

yeah, I did a similar thing in Mach 3 GCode editor. It opens it up in notepad where you can do the same thing.

I just printed a keyring of pacman I knocked up. Well chuffed.