I have resumed the folly of 3d printing after a nearly year long hiatus

place your bets until how long it'll be until I'm ranting about how printers are a sin against man and god

crashed my slicer

I'm printing a calibration cube because I don't know what state I left this printer in.

presumably in the standard state of "it kinda works but I don't trust it"

crashed my slicer again
and again
third attempt worked.
I probably should have updated octoprint before hitting go, and I probably should have done some manually leveling, but hey, it seems to be printing so far.
also the filament has been sitting in a garage, loaded into the printer, for a year.
it's probably really shit by now. as soon as the cube finishes I'm gonna need to swap to something, anything, else
there's a lot of work that can and should be done on this printer, but it's all gonna be limited by the fact I can't stand up for more than 5 minutes
well, there's something going on with the z-axis, but it printed more or less.

I've also got to switch to a different power supply for the pi that's running octoprint, and upgrade the pi to a new OS (which requires backing up and restoring existing octopi settings) because my python is EOL.

so it's working, but I'm still sighing a lot

anyway I loaded new filament and I'm printing a chep cube again!
wow it's terrible

okay I printed a CE5P calicat after attempting to fix the z-offset issue. It still is horrible.

possibly this is mostly a temperature issue: I'm using the stock temperatures but I think I upgraded this to an all-metal hotend that needs to run higher?

include the photo, foone

reprinted with higher temp. it's better, but still bad.

so probably there's another issue. I remember I did a lot of rebuilding of the hot end in the final days of using this before, so who knows what's clogged in there?

I printed on a raft because the z-offset is still fuckt

@foone Looks like an extrusion issue to me, yeah
@foone I would recommend doing calibration prints with https://slic3r.org/, it shouldn’t take much time and it’ll help you get a working profile. (One of the calibrations is about extrusion rate, which may need adjusting here.)
Slic3r - Open source 3D printing toolbox

@foone Yeah it looks like either low temperature or high flow. But in both cases the extruder should have been loudly clicking.
@foone i dont know what those rings around the print are for, i assuming that they're an extra way to make sure the print bed is level. but it makes me think that the printer is making a summoning circle to conjure the print lol

@sudo_EatPant It’s a border. Mostly I think it just gives the extruder more time to prime and get flowing before the real action starts. Otherwise the first few mm may not extruded well if it didn’t fully self-prime.

I love thinking of it as a summoning circle though! That’s great.

@sudo_EatPant yeah they're a summoning circle. 3d printing is forbidden magic

@foone You may need to dry that filament. A food dehydrator running for a few hours would probably do, but an oven that can be set at 120F (140F is a little high but would do) (not C!) for a couple of hours can work as well at least for PLA.
Alternatively you can print with filament that is still vacuum sealed.

Note that at 140F in an oven the spool itself if in plastic may start deforming. Make sure it's on a cookie sheet (or other metal flat surface) and flip it upside down every half hour.

@jf_718 This red filament is brand new, I only unsealed it before doing these two prints
@foone Ah, in that case I'd bump up the extrusion temperature by 10C and see how that goes. Sorry, I read earlier in the thread that the filament had been exposed for a year but didn't realize it was another spool. My bad.
@jf_718 no worries. that's what I'm doing now, yeah: I bumped up the temperature to 210C and lowered the retraction distance a little. it's printing now

@foone @jf_718 Unfortunately it's possible to get wet filament straight from the original vacuum sealed bags. They use water to cool it when making the filament, so it can retain moisture straight from the factory.

But this does seem more like something impeding the extrusion more than the filament itself since it seems to be somewhat consistent with both types.

Wouldn't hurt to do a cold pull/atomic pull to make sure there isn't a partial clog since it sat for a while.

@jimp @foone @jf_718 i’ll second this, extruder’s pooping so it may be a clog, but i’d calibrate e-steps if you haven’t yet as well
@foone @jf_718 filament can be wet out of the box; however here it’s a problem with under extrusion.
@foone Looks badass, though.
@foone X gonna give it to you. And by "it", I mean, whatever that is.

@foone Oh, I have one of those. Mine's blue.

It's kind of an heirloom from my dad.

@kawa your dad was a 3d printerer?

@foone He dabbled. I helped blender up some simple models for some of his projects, and he got me a green scale model of the #Asspull3X. Which is *slightly* peelable compared to the cube, Grogu, and prototype device faceplate, and the only green print of his that I have, so that's interesting.

I wonder who got his printer?

@foone I also wonder where the fuck the calipers he left me to measure out that device faceplate went off to. Should be *somewhere* in my apartment...
@foone why i have no desire to get into 3d printing. 2d printing is bad enough
@foone under-extrusion can do that
@foone oops! that's not filament! that's the flesh of the innocent! rookie mistake
@foone a
h-how?
@foone oohhhh, broke when removing from zhe plate?
@foone The Hellraiser 14 Lament Configuration.
@foone ah, 3D printing. it's like being into denial kink without being into denial kink.
@gsuberland @foone it's kinda nuts how i've always experienced it like that, and my headmate just... sends a print to print, and it simply does the thing. unbelievable honestly
@foone With this build quality, I see what the X box kerfluffle is about.
@foone
Well, I expect nothing less from X...
@foone Did it turn into the N axis?
@rallias I hate it when my dimensions rotate through the 4th dimension!
@foone that's probably slight delamination. Possible the head is calibrated slightly too far away from the print bed.
@foone ooh actually, I missed the warping at the bottom there. Possibly too CLOSE to the bed actually
@Nine that's after a raft, so I'm not sure it's indicative of bed issues. The calibration distance is likely, I seem to recall it's insane on this printer (you have to calibrate it on the touchscreen, then reverse-calibrate it in the gcode? something like that?)
@foone yeah my neptune 4 used to have this issue. I actually nearly destroyed an entire printhead before I realised the issue I'd caused by pushing the head too close to the bed. The rafts LOOKED fine but because it was too close, as it extruded, material progressively oozed up around the nozzle, causing slight adhesion of freshly printed parts to the nozzle as it moved, causing lifting in places as well as it pulled apart the still not fully set layers a little... Eventually I got the blob of death. Had to replace the whole printhead x.x
@Nine that sounds very likely to be my issue, yeah.
@foone "what on earth is the N-ax- oh"
@foone Looks like underextrusion, which could be any number of things, but it could easily just be the filament degraded sitting there so long.
@jimp @foone I would agree with this assessment. I would also suggest switching from the chep cube to the Cali Cat model for these basic function tests.
@Argonel @jimp for any technical reasons, or just because it's way cuter?

@foone @Argonel It tests more things than the cube does, and it's better than benchy for certain tests, but if you're just looking for a basic dimensional and flow test the cube is still good.

If you aren't yet interested in diagnosing things like overhangs and so on then I'd just keep running the cube until you sort out the extrusion issue(s).

The CaliCat is definitely cuter, though, and easier to pass off to people instead of throwing out.

@foone @jimp purely for appearance. It becomes plastic trash that is worth looking at vs boring plastic trash.
@Argonel @foone No matter how a printer mangles a poor CaliCat someone will take pity and want it.
@foone ouch! Anyhow you got this far, so good on you!
@foone A filament baker is not a bad idea too.
@revk eh this filament is nearly out, I'm just gonna toss it. I've got plenty of unopened filament that's still good