Test the design rules for your 3D printer(s)

Ultimaker 2

Cura

CtrlV Test - Link

To test our 3d printer we searched on Thingiverse a model that had more parameters to be tested at the same time and we found this

-->Changing Material

We used 3 different types of PLA: wine red, white and green

-->Cleaning the Build Plate

After removing the build plate from his right placement, we cleaned it using:

spray cleaner for removing some residual dirt

alcohol for to make the plate cleaner

We downloaded, installed and opened Cura, a free software for 3D printing. From here, we opened the downloaded STL file for setting up values for 3D printing. And than, following some setting suggestions founded in the file's description in Thingverse, we used these settings:

Quality

Layer Height - 0.1 mm

Shell

Wall Thickness - 0.8 mm

Top/Bottom Thickness - 0.8 mm

Infill

Infill Density - 30%

Infill Pattern - Lines

Material

Enable Retraction YES

Support

Generate Support - NO

Build Plate Adhesion

Build Plate Adhesion Type - Raft

Raft Extra Margin - 10 mm

Raft Smoothing - 5 mm

The extimated time for print this object was 2h 16min

At the end, we clicked on Save to File naming it Test.gcode and we copied it inside an SD card. You can download it from here.

We inserted the SD card inside the Ultimaker 2 printer and we pressed the ON/OFF button in the back.


At this step we sprinkled some hairspray on the plate: this is useful to ensure that the material adheres better to the plate.


And only after around 30 seconds We selected Print from the menu. Than we searched our file and we confirmed it pressing the button.

We repeated the test with three different materials and using print parameters for the White material we used lower quality parameters while the green one we used higher quality parameters

We came to the concluded that the quality of the material is very important, because the prints made with new PLA (the white one) are significantly better than the other although the parameters that we used are for a lower quality, while with the old PLA (wine red and green) was low despite fine print quality parameters