I am curious what the experienced people do when they get a new filament or different colour.
I have almost finished fine tuning my first 3d printer to one filament brand / colour, but have ordered some PLA+ from 3Dfillies.com
As a normal process, what would you do and in what order?
Eg. Print a temperature tower, calibration cube, retraction tower?
I check the extruder pressure and flow to make sure that the hotend temp (initially a guess based on the manufactures recommended range, and experience with my printers) is good, and then print whatever I intended to use that filament for. Bed adhesion issues are usually easy to see right away, so I’ll stop the print and make an adjustment if necessary. From there, my first print with the new spool shows me what I need to know. If my settings were close enough, then I have a usable part plus information to improve future prints. If something was off, then I know exactly why it’s a problem for that specific application. However, if I run test cubes/towers, then I have information minus the plastic and print time, and it still may not show me something that is important in the actual part.
That said, I think it depends a lot on your use case. I print mostly small, functional objects, with low cosmetic value. I run a few as singles, checking not only the print quality, but also that the design will work as intended. (Truth be told, I run far more “practice parts” due to design changes than printer issues.) When everything looks good, I multiply in the slicer and run them in batches (if needed). If my use case was mostly printing large, long print time, highly detailed objects, then I would certainly run test pieces for whatever factor(s) that I was concerned about though.
Cheers