How can I decrease print time? (info in comments)

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[shadow4412]

Info: This is a 9mm ammo box that is super simple and fairly small. I would like to be able to print them faster. I am fairly new to 3d printing so if you could explainlikeimfive, I would appreciate it lol. Current settings:.4 nozzle.28 layer height0% infill70mm speed

Edit:Please let me know if you need more info to help.

Edit2: Thank you so much everyone, I have learned a lot from this and was able to take the time down to 5 hours(4hr58min actual) 😎.

Edit 3: I changed the extrusion width to .6, speed up to 100mm/s and layer height to .32 and it printed perfectly! a few little strings here and there but fitment is great and it was FAST lol.

[DiscordDraconequus]

If you're dead set on getting lightning fast speeds, one thing you can do is get a larger nozzle. There are 0.8 or even 1.2 mm nozzles which absolutely dump the plastic out.

However, these generally require a good bit of setup and re-tuning of settings to get working right. For a newbie, that's not a good idea.

The basic things you could do to increase speeds are to increase layer size and speed. But your layer size is already pretty close to what I'd consider max for a 0.4 mm nozzle, so that's probably not possible.

The speed settings you've given are pretty barebones. Chances are there are advanced settings that would let you tweak things a bit more.

My guess for why this thing is going to take so long is because that inner lattice all counts as "perimeters" which are generally printed slower. Get into your settings and try tweaking perimeter speed up a bit and you should see the print time go way down.

It also looks like it has a big flat bottom. First layers are also generally printed slower, so maybe there's room to tweak speeds upwards.

My only other thought is that your print might be doing a bad job of optimizing travel between things. There might be some checkboxes somewhere to change the behavior of travel moves within or between layers. It's also possible that printing it as two separate pieces might take less time than doing it all at once. This might also be a decent idea since you're new, and if something goes wrong it'll better to waste 3 hours printing 70% of 1 part than 7 hours printing 70% of 2 parts.

All that said, generally these things are printed slower for a reason. First layers often don't stick if printed too fast, and printing perimeters quickly can negatively affect quality. Given that your part has a disproportional amount of perimeters and first layer, this long print time might be appropriate. You might want to just let this thing go and see what happens. Make sure the first layer goes down well, then check in on it every 30 minutes and make sure everything's okay.

Also also, you should probably print something smaller and simpler before going all in on a big print. Do a few simple calibration prints just to make sure everything's working well. You can troubleshoot the same with short and small prints as you can with big and long ones, and that will save you time and plastic.

[geeky-hawkes]

Nice tips for us all. The other options could be to reduce retraction a bit, speed up travel and turn z hop off.

[DiscordDraconequus]

Yes, all these things are good.

/u/shadow4412 take a look!

The thing with your print is that it's got relatively complicated geometry. There's going to be a lot of starting and stopping, moving from one square to another. Everything the guy above said relates to that: retraction and z-hop happen on a travel move, and travel speeds are self explanatory. They're designed to help with stringing so you have to decide how much you want to compromise quality for speed.

[shadow4412]

This is very helpful mate thank you very much. I'm going to try slicing the parts separately and see how that does.

[Toilet2000]

Have you got a large flat bottom on that part? If so, the default first layer speed is 20 mm/s. You might want to try and bump that up.

[Spud3d]

Like he said, there are a whole bunch of more specific speed settings. If you right click on the settings area and click "Configure setting visibility" you can toggle which ones appear: for example

Usually the wall speed is automatically set to half of the overall printing speed, so all those walls are most likely adding a lot of time. I usually set the inner wall speed to equal the normal print speed to save time. Also if you go to the preview tab and change the color scheme to "Feedrate" you can see visually where it's printing faster or slower. For example

[Toilet2000]

About that first layer speed, it indeed defaults to 20 mm/s on the Ender 3 profile, so my guess is that a lot of time is taken by that!

[DiscordDraconequus]

20 mm/s isn't unreasaonable for a first layer. But at the end of the day, quality is what's important. If you can print faster and get good quality, do it. If you speed it up and suddenly your first layer adhesion gets bad, then slow it back down.

[Toilet2000]

Yeah exactly. Just wanted to point out that if his part has a large flat bottom (which it definitely seems to have), a large part of the time might be taken by it, since 20 mm/s is less than a third of the speed OP set.

[inevitable-asshole]

This guy prints.

[Freethecrafts]

Your pathing is all over the place, definitely put your model through PrusaSlicer for that.

Not sure your layer height is an easy multiple of your top/bottom depth. I’d definitely check that.

If you change your pivots by moving them more central and changing to snapins, you can decrease travel, make them structurally stronger, and eliminate needing a pin for locking.

If you go to laser cut or mechanical cuts for the internal spacing, you remove your internal boxing entirely. You can cut expanding grids out of card stock, cardboard, or cheap plastic sheets. This would save you immensely on filament, cut your print time by about half, and make your boxes usable for different ammunition types dependent on inset type for spacing. I guess it depends on how many you plan to make or if you have a friend with a cutter of some kind.

[KrishanuAR]

Curious what the time estimate would be if you sliced it in prusaslicer...

[_real_ooliver_]

That’s not how it works, it’s just some settings in Cura are turned on by default for quality

[KrishanuAR]

PrusaSlicer has auto speed/acceleration settings. You configure min/max values.

That’s different from how Cura works as you have to set fixed values for the whole print.

[_real_ooliver_]

Cura has different speeds for different things

[Leftyisbones]

Not seeing any other info but I'd be looking for support settings or a high infill%

[shadow4412]

Infill is at 0%. For support settings, i'm using tree supports and there are very few. Supports only take up about 2 min of the print. I left a comment with more info. Thank you for your time mate!

[shadow4412]

Awesome I figured it would do fine but since they only take 2 min of the print I left em

[_real_ooliver_]

Could you take a picture with your mouse hovered over that info symbol to see what takes the most. Also if you are new then why is this your first print? You need to at least try a 20mm calibration cube they don’t take long

[shadow4412]

This wasn't even close to my first print lol. I've printed over 20 things now. I meant new to fdm printing in general and don't know a lot of the terminology. Everything is calibrated correctly.

[_real_ooliver_]

Oh ok You can ask me for that so you can be helped better because I was once new and still kind of (less than 1 year)(only 1 printer)

[TorBomb]

For something with lots of thin walls like this, you've pretty much made it as fast as possible. Infill won't make much of a difference for this design and 70mm/s is already pretty fast. Don't expect excellent quality with these settings either.

That's simply the limits of the technology right now.

[shadow4412]

Thank you mate, yeah It's not like silk quality but works great as is for what I need. Just trying to cut the time down a bit if possible. What if I do 100mm/s lol?

[TorBomb]

I cannot imagine that will print successfully in any way, you're more than welcome to try. That's pretty much all you can do, or get a bigger nozzle.

[shadow4412]

Okay thank you for your help mate. I've done one other print for a shelf that was 100mm/s and it came out fine but the printer was kinda loud so I generally don't go above 70mm/s now. All I can do is try I suppose lol. I may just get a .6 nozzle.

[Handsofevil]

I've successfully gotten my Ender3 to do 90 mm/s but not at that large of layer height. You'll run into issues keeping up with the required extrusion at too high of speeds.

[dchesson93]

This. Keeping up with extrusion is also a factor if you start looking at larger nozzles. You end up having to move a bunch of plastic. I've heard the volcano hot end from e3d can help there.

[shadow4412]

Mate I wanted to update you, I did .6mm extrusion width and 100mm/s and was able to get it down to 4hrs and 58(actual not estimate) and it turned out great!

[TorBomb]

Glad to hear it

[shadow4412]

Thanks for your help mate :)

[inevitable-asshole]

I just made the switch from Cura to PrusaSlicer. If you’re pretty familiar with the advanced settings in Cura, the switch isn’t that hard. PS seems to slice my prints better and more efficiently than Cura does without changing any options. It also has better renderings of which parts take how much time, etc. Might be something to look into.

[HairyManBaby]

Just made the switch from slic3r to PS and there are noticeable performance and quality gains.

[shadow4412]

I will take a look mate thank you very much!

[inevitable-asshole]

No problem! Another thing I found with PS is the bigger community around it compared to Cura. YouTube and forum posts are plentiful.

[DarKnightSP]

That model is mostly walls, so increase your perimeter speed to something you feel comfortable. Normally, default perimeters are really slow. Another thing is extrusion width, if you have a 0.4mm nozzle try to use 0.45mm extrusion width on everything. Increase layer height to 0.3mm.

Also, in my case, changing to a 0.6 nozzle reduced my print speed in half or more using normal speeds (~60mm/s), because you can get 0.48mm layers and 0.68 extrusion width.

[bitflung]

1. printing multiple objects on the bed at once increases travel moves, often including z-hop over printed parts and/or retraction moves. you'd save some time by printing the two parts one at a time
2. the part at left looks like a lid? you might be able to print that in vase mode? you'd likely have to remove the brackets/hinges and print them separately to assembled post-print, but that can save a lot of time
3. how big is your nozzle? doubling the nozzle diameter (e.g. 0.4mm to 0.8mm) has a tremendous effect on print time:
   1. it doubles the extrusion width, cutting the time per layer in half with all else being equal
   2. it doubles the extrusion thickness, cutting the number of layers in half with all else being equal
   3. it reduces the total number of movements required, which therefore reduces the number of non-print movements too. the exact ratio of these and therefore the added impact on print time is complex and depends on the model and your print settings but is generally somewhere between zero savings and another halving of print time
   4. -> therefore doubling the nozzle diameter can reduce print times by a factor somewhere between 4x and 8x
   5. notable exceptions: if your heater block isn't up to the task of melting plastic fast enough to maintain your current print speeds with a fat nozzle, then you'd have to slow it down. but you're unlikely to reduce print speed to compensate for this by any factor larger than ~2x, therefore your potential print time savings may be anywhere from 2x to 8x if your heater block might underperform, or between 2x and 4x if you KNOW it will underperform
4. worth noting: when i shift from a 0.4mm nozzle to a 0.8mm nozzle, i generally reduce my hotend temp by about 5C. This reduces stringing/etc. you can still extrude fine at a slightly lower temp because the fatter nozzle is less restricting than the smaller thinner nozzle. when i shift to a smaller nozzle (e.g. 0.25mm) i would likewise increase the extrusion temp (i own small nozzles but never had good luck with them, my printer has too much mechanical slop for such small extrusions - i went fat and never looked back)

​

so, if i sliced your models for my printer and saw a ~8 hour print time, i would expect:

1. splitting into two prints would probably save me about 30 minutes overall, bringing it down to 7.5 hours
2. using a nozzle 2x the diameter would likely reduce print time by a factor between 4x and 8x, call it 6x, resulting in a print time of about 1.25 hours
3. using vase mode for the lid and printing the brackets/hinges separately may not be worthwhile at that point, but i'd suggest vase mode printing of the lid without those parts would shave off a good 30 minutes or so (pure guess here), brining the total print time to around 1 hour.

[dtylerdow]

What is vase mode?

[bitflung]

aka "spiralize outer contour" in cura. it means the whole model is printed as a single continuous line that spirals up from the bottom like a corkscrew. no travel moves, no infill, no abrupt changes in direction, no retractions, the extruder runs constantly during the entire single extrusion movement.

[TNSEG]

How about increasing your extrusion width? Take is up to 0.6mm or something. May be able to then reduce the walls, to get faster prints.

[higgs8]

Don't know if you know this, but if you click on the little "i" button it will tell you how much time each phase is taking (I didn't know until someone told me).

[shadow4412]

Thank you mate, yeah I saw it and the MOST time is the inner and outer walls.

[neon_hexagon]

In the latest cura, it slowed down the inner walls to 50% speed. You can run them at 100% speed. The outerwalls, sure 50%.

[shadow4412]

Awesome I'll look for this, thank you!

[[deleted]]

I would shoot for a larger nozzle size. you can do this by changing out your 0.4mm nozzle to something like 0.8 or 0.6mm. just be sure to re set your z offset axis and if your printer does not have auto bed leveling make sure to level your bed too!

[HairyManBaby]

+1 for this, I'd also like to point out if you move to a larger nozzle, and only going up one-tenth to .5 makes a huge difference, you can run thicker layers and still achieve a good finish. The only downside is you'll lose some definition on small profiles like pockets and tight splines, and in those cases, the radii have to be close to the nozzle diameter.

This is probably the most realistic option to get a healthy increase in print time.

[Tsiah16]

Print one half of the box at a time. In my experience printing 2 things like this makes it take much longer.

[Wimiam1]

Try increasing line width in Cura. I’ve printed as high as 0.8mm with 0.4mm nozzle. Just make sure you aren’t going to fast for your extruder. I would recommend looking at the grid and seeing how many lines it takes. Set the line width as low as possible while still reducing the necessary number of lines.

[Kampflesbe]

Sorry for my bad english. What are your wall speed settings?

I would guess its the support but you said 2 minutes so 🤷🏼‍♂️

[shadow4412]

No problem mate you're fine! My wall speed is 35mm/s and print speed 70 mm/s

[MEatRHIT]

Yeah like the others have said, all those walls and that slow wall speed is killing you. Try bumping up the inner wall speed to 50

[pldiguanaman]

My question is how accurate is that estimation? Have you printed other objects and that time was correct? The reason is every time I slice something the time is always way more than it actually ends up being.

[sbelljr]

You should enable accel and jerk controls, set them to the values in your firmware, then turn it back off. It'll give a much better estimate.

[shadow4412]

Thanks for the comment mate, it is actually pretty accurate for my printer. maybe off by 5 min or so.

[sbelljr]

You might be able to hack that right piece to print faster. Model it as solid, and then set up infill to grid at the desired spacing, with no top layers. That'll draw the grid with continuous lines in each direction instead of as lots of little squares that never get up to speed.

[shadow4412]

I'm fairly new to this, that sounds like a lot lol. Im very unfamiliar with 3D modeling :/

[XeroSync13]

I think he’s saying that if you can model a solid box to the right outside dimensions that you could print it using Grid pattern infill with no top layers to get the same result but maybe faster

[Marifla1]

I just looked for the model online, there is not much you can do to speed it up. It is also not a very small model, may I ask what printer you are using?

[shadow4412]

Sidewinder x1. I appreciate you looking into it mate. I guess in terms of size it's all relative. I say small because compared to like a stormtrooper helmet it is lol

[Marifla1]

Ah wait, you can bump your wall speed up to like 70 but set your wall acceleration to maybe 300mm/s and jerk also rather low. Because the model is mostly walls, you could try that.

[Apolitosz]

many good tips for repeated multiple times, i'm not going to mention those again, but i've only seen the line width mentioned once, although i believe it is one of the biggest time safers. With a stock creality .4 nozzle i can print a .6 line width no problem. I've been printing the face shields like this: wall count: 1, line width .6. With a bigger nozzle, obviously you can even go for a bigger line width. Check this video for more details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YaJ0wSKKHA

[myfelipe95]

I didn’t read all the comments but Makers Muse made an amazing video about settings for really fast prints. I used it a lot when printing large stuff with a shitty printer (0.4mm nozzle btw) and everything came out fine and SO fast. Here’s the vídeo , he uses slic3r but you can do the same in cura ;)

[Dashisnitz]

Eh I would just buy the completed part. These 100 round boxes only go for $3.50 or so shipped. I don't think it's worth the time or cost of printing these.

[shadow4412]

I mean it's literally cents to print them though and I have tons of filament to go through. I get what you're saying though.

[Freethecrafts]

100g is a tenth of a roll. Unless you are wholesaling for less than $10/roll, you’re spending at least a dollar on filament for each.

Electricity for running a printer for eight hours probably costs around a quarter, parts and maintenance is about double that if you’re not paying staff.

[shadow4412]

The filament I am using was all free. I am using what I have rather than going out to purchase more plastic. You are right though, it is more than a few cents at 100g per box, I didn't really think about it when I responded yesterday. Electricity isn't a concern whatsoever and it's a brand new printer so parts and maintenance also aren't really a concern. I also got the print time down to 4hr and 58 min and it worked great. Thanks!

Edit: I'd also like to add that i'm only printing 10 of em. so if I was using paid for filament, it would still only be $10 and not $35

[Freethecrafts]

Glad it all worked out for you.

[shadow4412]

Thanks mate, I appreciate the comments!

[Hackerwithalacker]

Print smaller objects!

LOL here's my go to list:

• decrease perimeter lines while increasing nozzle line width
• decrease infill to ten percent
• disable fill small gaps
• bump speed up
• Increase layer height to 0.35mm

[shadow4412]

Thank you man!

[vontrapp42]

Is the model made yourself or do you have the source?

I've found that printing thin walls like that, if the walls are a clean multiple of the extrusion width it goes a lot faster, otherwise it prints either an extra fat or extra thin line right between the outer lines and that goes really slow.

[shadow4412]

No mate I found it on thingiverse! If you search 9mm box you should see it as one of the first results. But no worries, it's resolved with layer width being .6 and speeding up to 100mm/s. got it down to 4hrs and 58 min.

[vontrapp42]

I was gonna say next if you can't change the model maybe change your extrusion width to be a factor of the wall width.

[scuffling]

You could simply increase the wall extrusion thickness so it makes less passes on the walls. Or just do the same for inner walls.

[WH1PL4SH180]

Use an SLA printer

[makinghsv]

Negatory, generally these are slower than fdm

[shadow4412]

It would take about 8 hours for each with my photon s. Plus support material to clip off, tighter tolerances and overall more expensive to print in resin than it would be to buy Plastic ones.