I’m a bit stumped, and am looking for advice. I have an extremely old (Circa 2015) Craftbot Plus. It’s hardly any parts of the original unit, kept alive with custom parts out of just spite. I use cura as my slicer, and it works fine for my needs. Recently, my kids have wanted to print custom keycaps. This is a difficult FDM print to begin with, and my old hardware isn’t doing me any favors; it might be impossible. That being said, my prints turn out good, except for the tiny details in the actual stem. The picture is attached of various settings; I’ve tried a ton of stuff. I can share a cura profile, but the gist is I’m printing in PLA and have experimented with 195-210 degrees, .1mm layer height, line widths between .175-.2mm, various speeds, minimum speed and minimum layer duration, I’ve disabled ironing, and I’ve played with retraction. I’m kind of stumped, and am wondering if anyone has things I should try.

  • okwhateverdude@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    12 days ago

    Can you share a screen cap of the mesh so we can see what it supposed to look like? It is difficult to see what the center is supposed to be.

    One thing I can see in your print, it is looks like your hardware struggles with arcs or you’ve configured cura weirdly to not use arcs.

    If the center bit is supposed to hold a T-shape (like a philips head screw driver), you probably need to play with the number of walls vs fill (i’d probably make that all walls).

      • okwhateverdude@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        9 days ago

        Okay! That makes it really clear. How does the gcode pathing look for the center bit? Does it pick up and travel any? I bet the blobbing you’re seeing is because of infill/walls for those very tight angles. Something that might print a bit better on your printer is to round off the points in the corners and switch to all walls.

        • surfrock66@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          2·
          9 days ago

          I think the thing I’m fixated on now is getting those layers to take longer to print. I posted on the Cura forums, and they think there’s a specific G-code that’s not getting respected. They are describing it as a firmware bug, and if I figure that out, I may be able to develop some sort of a substitution automatically.