1 November 2025
Having aborted the big nose-cone section yesterday I started again with the back to that section which is much smaller and allows me to see where the problems are. The surface patterning on both parts is a little random, and while I can see the layer printing pattern, it is masked a little my 'noise'. I am fairly sure this is down to the poor stability of the table, so I need to move it to a more stable base. Having built the trolley for the dolls house, it seems silly not to use that and although the noise will be in the lounge, given that parts are going to need to be run over night this seems the right approach short term. I can work on the lower layers of the dolls house and only really need the trolley when I start to add the main body of the house. So I need to have a sort out of where stuff is stored for now. Not being able to move the 3D printer up into the loft is a little problem, but I can at least put the panels for the dolls house there in the short term and hopefully can actually WORK in the basement up there.
The one thing I am not entirely sure on is just what nozzle is fitted to the extruder. I have ones for 0.2mm, 0.3mm and 0.4mm and I think the default was the 0.4, but I'm not sure 5 years on if I switched to the 0.3 to give finer resolution. Having NOW read the printing instructions from Gambody for the Cura slicer I have a lot better understanding of what is going on, and I now have the slicer configured with the 12 pages of settings that came with the model files. While the rear cone part has printed completely it has a few problems such as the bottom edge seems to have squashed out slightly and will not fit inside the front section as it should. That said, it is usable and is something I can practice painting on to see what works at that stage. I run up a couple of small parts this morning which only took 7 minutes to print, but one can not read the text on them which should say 'ALPHA MOONBASE' and I'm not sure if THAT is down to the nozzle being a little too big for the fine detail. Something to work on after the move. I'm currently running another larger part using 0.3mm setting in the slicer but I think I can see that the bead of plastic is not joining horizontally as it should so think that the nozzle must be 0.4mm and not enough material is being extruded. If that is the case I think I need to change down to a 0.3mm one, or even 0.2mm may be worth a try. Speed of printing seems to be the one variable I need to compromise on, and so being able to run the fine detail stuff with a 0.2mm nozzle while using the 0.3mm for the larger parts seems to be worth the effort.
So next on the todo list is to finish tidying the kit that came over with the 3D printer and get that off the floor. Clear out the corner where the dolls house is currently. Then move the printer over. At least the slicer is currently happily saving the gcode files direct to the microSD card and so I don't need to worry about a network link. That will come if I go for OctoPi and actually get around to sorting the high res camera to monitor prints while I am out and about. That the recommendation is that one 'does not leave the printer unattended' is a little problematic when some of the prints are coming in at 36 hours! The bedroom is definitely the wrong place to locate it ...