a triangle lives here

filament tests

I got a couple new colors of PETG to try. One is still coming and is transparent (pink) so it's going straight into the dehydrator, but this cyan/teal/bright blue has played nice right away so if I put it in it's only cuz there's room in the machine.

a small cubic gargoyle amidst a pile of 3D print spaghetti, failed prints, and calibration objects

It's been a while since I've built a filament profile! I bought a fistful of colors with the printer so the brand matched and the presets were already basically there minus a little pressure advance tweaking; I had built a few relatively early in my prusaslicer days for the library in my last job, but those are years ago at this point. For this one I took bambulab's default PETG settings in orcaslicer as a starting point and ran a temperature tower, two rounds of flow rate calibration, and a PA angle test[1]. Adhesion was fine for all of these, but when I went to print my go to test object[2] adhesion became an issue a few layers in. I bumped up the first layer bed temp by 2° C as I noted that the first layer wasn't smooshing well either, and that ended up underlining the issue: the bed temp was just a little too cool and the parts were peeling themselves off--as soon as the temp got back to 70, they popped off, curling at the corners. Setting it to 72° for all layers worked a charm.[3]


  1. all of these are prepared and built and run through OrcaSlicer, which will automatically set up gcode and/or temp towers of any height for you; it's Really Nice ↩︎

  2. Deric Bindel's Brutalist Gargoyle; it's got lots of straight edges, parts to fit together, and the end product is Neat and I don't mind having a bunch floating around--and ditto to my daughter, who treats them as an ever growing family. ↩︎

  3. there could be some cold office issues at play here too, but I let the bed sit at 70 until the glass top was warm to the touch before printing the 72° first layer trial so I don't anticipate I'll need to change this in hotter months. One of these days I'll buy a thermometer to stash in the printer--it genuinely is wild to me that for all its bells, whistles, and improvements the P1S has no ambient temp sensor. ↩︎