Up! Printer at 245C, Results

A follow up to yesterday's post on Up! temperature adjustment.

After using the machine and printing a bunch of parts at a reduced temperature with MakerGear filament, here are my observations.


Smell Factor
At 275C, the entire room is filled with a noxious odor with mild notes of ammonia and hints of burning mineral oil. In that beer, no amount of bittering hops will cover that acrid scent. After printing, the acrid scent lingers with the part.

At 245C, the molten plastic emits a pleasant scent of lavender and honey. Actually, no - but it doesn't smell like cat piss in a machine shop. After cooling, the print has no odor.

Snap, Crackles and Pops
At 275C, the MakerGear plastic makes popping sounds despite best efforts to dry out the plastic. At 245C, there are almost no pops. I assume this is related to the reduced amount of off gassing that occurs.

Support Separation
The only thing that can help here is bigger parts and/or larger layers. Rather than 1 "link3.stl" part, I printed 18. This gives each layer enough time for each layer to cool. MakerGear's material is much more brittle than Up!'s OEM plastic, something to keep in mind for part design. <-- that is another discussion altogether (prepare for a professional discussion about 'necking').

You'll still want to print at or near .2mm layer thickness. The print settings for feeds/speeds are better than .4mm.

MakerGear, .4mm, "Hollow" - Imploded due to poor support

Quality
At 275C, the quality is "acceptable" - not as good as OEM material but still functional.

At 245C, the quality is great! Still not equivalent to OEM, but VERY close. Thin wall support did not remain attached as it did at higher temperatures and each layer looks smoother - less jittery. The Jitter is NOT from vibration as I previously thought - instead, it's from the plastic "wiggling" out of the nozzle as it comes out.

Consequences
Higher viscosity material (e.g. "cold" plastic) requires more pressure to squeeze through the extrusion nozzle. This, in turn puts more pressure on the print head and requires higher torque from the motor. The Up! electronics use two big .33ohm resistors for current sensing so the controller knows when to limit current. So, you shouldn't have to worry about excessive current killing your motor - that's taken care of in hardware.

How do I know? I fooled the printer into thinking the nozzle was hot and started to extrude. Nothing happened and the machine's power consumption remained constant. I did this, now you don't need to.


Here's how to change the temperature.