3D printer updates - it (mostly) just works!

Hello everyone! Welcome to the first official post to the TBNL Devblog :)

Today’s post details a suite of recent tweaks and improvements to my 3D printing workflow on the Ender 5 Plus.

First and foremost, I have switched from primarily printing in ABS to experimenting with PLA. I recently purchased a 3kg spool of Overture’s black PLA with the plan to start experimenting once I ran out of my existing stock of ABS. That being said, the Ender 5 Plus’s stock spool holder is not wide enough to support the 3kg spool, so I had to whip something up in Onshape.

My design for the extended spool holder is compatible with the stock bracket and comes with a support structure to provide support on the far end of the spool holder. All parts were designed to be printed without supports and are holding up great in PETG printed with 2 perimeters. Here is the Onshape document for those interested.

Additionally, I have been working to optimize my slicer profiles and have been shopping for alternatives to the PrusaSlicer install which has been my workhorse thus far; after much searching, OrcaSlicer has been selected as my new slicer of choice!

I am still in the process of tuning my OrcaSlicer profiles, but I am already seeing tremendous improvements in terms of quality and reliability over comparable profiles in PrusaSlicer. So far, I have printed the main structural element for the Something Gay avionics bay with a fair degree of success! The overall quality is quite high, though I did experience moderate stringing due to the low default retraction distance of 0.8mm and enabled Z-hop in OrcaSlicer - increasing retraction distance to 3mm and disabling Z-hop eliminated the stringing entirely. I still need to calibrate the extrusion multiplier and printing speeds, but I am overall deeply satisfied with the OrcaSlicer experience so far and intend to stick with it, at least for the foreseeable future.