Hey everyone.
I built an mk3s+ from its kit form successfully, tested a few PLA prints with the stock 0.4 nozzle.
I’ve set prusaslicer to use a 0.6 nozzle now that I’ve upgraded, and am using PETG. Prints look pretty bad, in spite of calibrating z-offset etc.
If you were doing something like this for the first time, what would your setup steps be like?
To be specific, using a diamondback 0.6 nozzle, matterhackers PETG at 235c.
Issues I’m seeing are a really bad loss of detail, lots of stringing, etc.
eta: added a photo of a moderately post-processed part. Notice how rough the top surface looks, there’s a disconnect between perimeter loops, etc.
I got PETG working on my Mini clone by basically just switching to 0.6 nozzle profiles from the wizard and using the generic PETG profile.
But, if you’re new to PETG, know that it gets real moisture sensitive, real fast. Sounds like you might benefit from trying to dry the filament out, check the web for more on that.
After making sure the filament was dry and that my initial layer is good, because changing nozzles means you need to fine tune the z offset again, I would print a retraction tower test and dial in retraction length settings.
That a good basic troubleshooting list.
Z was recalibrated already. I’ll try a 50c bake for a few hours to get rid of moisture.
Ordinarily, I’d expect to see evidence of bubbling/snapping at the nozzle as water boils out while laying down plastic. No obvious signs of that though.
Stringing and nozzle buildup are the general signs I get with petg being damp, extreme cases it’ll have noticeable bubble, I’ve found that I need to run 12+ hours at 54c to dry it sufficiently, even on relatively fresh spools depending on the supplier, age etc. I also recommend securing your spools if they’re paper based, had the adhesive melt on one and the entire thing fall to pieces, I just rewound it onto an empty plastic spool I had.
Edit. I just looked at the pics, yeah it also looks like you have some overexrusion, I tend to slightly underextrude petg because of nozzle buildup. I’d start with the standard prusa profiles and tweak from there, generally had good luck modifying the prusament profiles to work with other filament.