Ender 3 S1 Pro and Sonic Pad with drops

3d Printing / Slicers / Setup / Problems
1

I decided to get the Creality Sonic pad to move my printing into the klipper arena. After I installed it and went through a dozen you tube videos on how to set it up, I am finally printing. Creality offers a set of Cura profiles, they have a slicer based off of Cura, to make the transition easier. The have two profiles for common filament options for normal printing and fast printing. I thought I should start with what they call normal so I am using a profile for my specific printer and PETG.

Bufore I printed I cleaned the hot end and changed the nozzle to a new stainless nozzle.

To get started I made a small block 30mm x 30mm and using the normal profile, I assumed this profile has given good results at the factory, and printed it.

Buggers
Buggers1920×2550 591 KB

After I printed the first 10 layers of the print I stopped the print and the above was the result. I took the cover off of the nozzle/hot end to see if some filament was leaking and could not see any.

I will do more testing to see if I can see what is causing this, first will lower the infill speed.

Any suggestions for why these drops are here would be appreciated. I have read that they caused by over extruding. I did a test, from a youtube video, and it seems to be correct. I will lower it if it gets to that.

Edit:
I did a bunch of tests at different speeds and different extrusion setting and the following two images seem like the best so far. I guess I could go lower in speed. The question for now is, are these sufficient until I figure it out better, after all it is only infill. The part that I am currently working on does not have a torque to worry about.

BuggersII
BuggersII1920×1446 439 KB

The image on the left is at 65 m/s and on the right is 75 m/s infill speed. I could probably go to 85 m/s with little difference.

I still need to better understand what causes this, any suggestions would be appreciated.

Could a better nozzle help out? I use the ones from Creality but have seen E3D X nozzles and some for close to $100. Microswiss CM2 are also in the $20 price range? Anyone use any of these?

2

I recently switched my S1 (not Pro) to use a BTT Pad 7. It took a bit of work to get it going, but have had good success with it after a bunch of tuning, however I’ve only been printing with PLA and TPU.

With PLA I can print infill around 150mm/s, so 75 seems pretty slow, but maybe that’s a PETG vs PLA thing. I can’t clearly see what’s going on in your print, but it looks like there’s some gaps, but also blobs in the infill. You might try different temperature settings as well as switching back to a brass nozzle to see if there’s any difference, since stainless steel is fairly poor heat conductor, it might be affecting getting enough heat to the filament.

This is just a guess, because I haven’t tried anything but brass nozzles.

3

Check out Ellis’ Print Tuning Guide. Lotsa of good advice there and Klipper macros too!

Cheers

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4

Thanks all for your response. I had to buy a new heater block a while ago because I stripped it out from too much tightening. It came with a sliver color nozzle instead of the brass I suspected. I was afraid to tighten too much and was a total disaster. I removed the nozzle and put on one I found in a bag that I purchased a while ago. I read the packaging and it was tungsten. I replaced it with a brass nozzle this morning and am printing infill at 130m/s. I have ordered a set of copper alloy nozzles and will see if that makes it any better.

At least for now I feel like the sonic pad is not a waist. Thanks again for all of your suggestions.

I will check out the Tuning Guide you mentioned.

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5

Thanks for this reference! I hadn’t seen this before.

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