Print a load of connection panels of course…. this was a good use of the 5m of PLA that is no good for anything else…
I also started printing some test hexagons too with a little of the glow in the dark PLA I have left. Two panels together seem to hold together well enough to print all the way up but the left side is a little wonky. This is possibly partly due to the fan that I removed my extruder fan a while ago when I had some problems with it, it’s not really needed for ABS.
I’ve been printing only ABS for ages so my PLA calibration seems to be a little off. My usual method of calibration is to print a 10x10mm tower and play with the extrusion rate and temperature every 5mm or so. This creates a tower of plastic quite quickly that makes it easy to figure out what the optimal rates are.This is after the normal manual checking of the filament diameter and checking the feed rate (mark 100m on the filament, extrude 100mm and see if they’re the same).
I have to wait for the new batch of PLA tomorrow to do this since the filament is always different.
Some people like to calibrate their printers to the n’th degree, which is fine if you’re printing one off items that you need to be high quality, I want my prints to come out as quickly as possible and I’ll worry about making a ‘perfect version’ once I have the model design perfected.
