Sunday, October 17, 2010

Operational again at 0.5 mm.

Okay, I got one of the spare 0.5 mm extruder heads mounted. I measured the output and discovered that I was getting swell to about 0.66 mm. That works out to 0.34 mm^2 cross sectional area.

When I was working with the 0.3 mm extruder head I was getting a swell to about 0.42 mm which works out to about 0.14 mm^2 or about 40% as much.

I tried printing a test raft using the old extruder set points and noticed that the base print roads for the raft, which had been well separated before, are overlapping now. In the morning I'll lop 60% off of the extruder's stepper speed and see what happens.

3 comments:

nophead said...

Odd, you shouldn't need to change anything when you change nozzle diameter. The same amount of plastic is going in, so the same comes out. It just comes out fatter and shorter, but as the head moves at the same speed it gets stretched to exactly the same dimensions as before. All you should notice is that as it is being stretched more holes will shrink more an it will have a tendency to cut corners.

Forrest Higgs said...

nop: fair enough. It's been so long since I changed nozzle diameters that I have no feel for what ought to be happening. :-(

Forrest Higgs said...

Nop: Yup, you're absolutely right. Thanks.