11. The Earring Project
After assembling the Ender3, and printing the test cubes, I desperately wanted to design an object from scratch and print it.
My wife also wanted to join the fun and suggested me to print an earring for her. I quickly did some research and found inspiration. After a quick session on Tinkercad started the design process.
The design part was easier than I thought. This is how it looked after designing.
However, while printing there were many issues. After spending so much time troubleshooting the issues, I learned a lot.
Below are the highlights:
- Make sure the printer is on top of a perfectly leveled surface. Two legs of my table were on the carpet while the other two were not.
- Make sure the printer is stable, especially during printing. I moved the printer to a glass shelf with a metal frame. However, it was not quite stable during printing. On top of it, the spool which was fixed on the top of the printer was not helping the stability factor.
- Check bed leveling: It is a good idea to check the bed level when you move the physical location of the printer.
- Make sure you know the profile settings of Slicer. My slicer is Cura, and I started tinkering the different settings available. You can turn on all settings options to see all the settings in Cura. Also, Cura will show the definition of each setting when you do a mouse hover on top of the name.
5. Try different Profiles: When I was searching in the dark I came to know about the Cura profiles shared by Chep and ChazMeister. I found ChazMeister's Cura profile when I was researching how to avoid the Stringing issue that I could see within the small triangles of the object.
I downloaded ‘Basic Stringing Test’ and printed it. Here is the result. Very minimal, negligible stringing!
The final Output
Using the same profile I printed the final version of the earring. Below is the result.
What I learned from the entire exercise is that there is no single settings that work in every scenario. You need to understand the settings and tweak it as you need.
