Most do it wrong, but mastering filament
calibration is the key to exceptional
print quality. Horrendous, weak, or
lowquality prints can turn incredibly
clean, stronger, and much faster with
just a few tricks. I'll show you exactly
how to do it for any filament printer
and slicer from beginner to expert in
only five simple steps and no weird
calculations. Let's get right into it.
First, I would always use Orca slicer
for calibration. It has the best
calibration tests for any printer brand
and all results can be used in all other
slicers. But this calibration even works
identical or extremely similar in
multiple other slicers as well. Inside
Orca slicer, make sure you select your
correct printer and standard print
profile. For the filament, we select the
correct filament brand preset if
available. for example, Polymaker PLA or
whatever filament you use. If your brand
doesn't exist as a preset, just use the
correct generic preset and then select
it in the drop-own menu like generic PLA
in my case. Now, at the top left corner,
we have our calibration test button. If
you don't see this, you might have to
enable advanced settings or go to
preferences and enable develop mode at
the bottom. for our different
calibrations. Doing them in the correct
order is extremely important as some
settings influence others down the line.
If you are a beginner, the pressure
advance and flow rate tests are
essential. The more you do of the rest,
the better, but I'll give you general
recommendations for each point if you
want to skip some. For higher print
quality and tests, make extra sure your
filament is dried and keep it dry in
some airtight storage with silica beads.
Use the colorless silica as others may
increase your cancer risk. Remember,
being born a cancer is good. Cancer in
your lungs is bad. Let's start with the
Best Temperature Setting for Strength & Detail?
nozzle temperature calibration. The lazy
but often okay enough approach is to use
the middle of the brand's recommended
temperature range listed on the spool or
in the online data sheet. The best
approach is clicking on calibration and
creating a temperature tower in our
previously prepared project. Just select
your filament type or enter a custom
range to automatically generate the
tower. If we now hit slice and select
temperature in the top right corner, we
can see that the nozzle temperature
increases by 5° for each segment. If LAN
and develop mode is enabled, Bamboo
printers can directly connect to Orca
Slicer to send prints, but you can
always export the G-code for any printer
and print it from the SD card, via USB,
or your network interface. We'll print
this out in matte white PLA and use top-
down studio lighting to see every little
line and defect. The wall surface at the
front looks very similar across all
temperatures. We get almost no stringing
in the low and middle temperatures, but
high temperatures show a little more.
The small detail cones look cleaner for
low temperatures, still good at 215°,
and okay at higher temperatures. The
bridging gets visibly worse at higher
temperatures. In contrast, looking at
the site shows better overhangs for
higher nozzle temperatures. In
conclusion, the overall best results for
my filament are around 250 to 220°.
Keep in mind for other filaments like
this green TPU, results may look quite
different. Always choose the temperature
with the best combinations of good
overhangs, little stringing, and clean
walls. Bridging can still be improved
with other settings. Also, keep in mind
that lower temperatures lead to less
layer adhesion and weaker prints. If you
have an acceptable temperature range, I
would go for the higher temperature
which leads to stronger prints. Higher
max volumetric flow and speed later.
Before we save our new value, create a
new project and don't save or transfer
anything so no weird calibration
settings get saved. In the new project,
go to filament settings and enter your
best temperature value. Then save it
with a name we can relate to that exact
filament in the future. Next up is max
Increase 3D Print Speed Without Losing Quality
volutric speed. This setting controls
the maximum speed at which the filament
can be pushed through the nozzle without
creating defects. It's highly nozzle and
material dependent and the most
important factor for print speed and
limits your real max speed. as your
printer automatically slows down all
moves that exceed this flow value. In
Orca Slicer, make sure you have the new
filament selected. If you are a
beginner, you can keep the generic value
or brand preset value. Calibration is
always best. So, we click on calibration
and max flow rate. You can keep the
standard test values for most filaments,
but some like TPU might even need lower
values. Rare cases like high flow
filaments can sometimes even go higher
than 20, but don't go too high. Very
high values might clock your nozzle, and
doing a second run is always safer.
We'll again generate and print the model
out. This time, we want to look for the
first layer with defects. Defects are
very obvious at the top, but my print
also has slight line defects further
down that are suspicious. Make sure to
check the sides with the rounded corners
as well. Some filaments will show a
change in surface sheen which indicates
material degradation and marks the max
flow limit. For very flexible filaments,
look more at the round corners as the
defects in the middle can also be due to
the unstable oneline geometry. Now we
just measure the distance from the
bottom to the first defect. My fancy
digital caliper.
I said digital. It reads exactly 33 mm.
Let's go back into the slicer preview
and in the top right select flow to show
the flow for each layer. We now drag the
slider down to 33 mm which is our first
defect height. If we start dragging the
second horizontal slider, we can read
the flow used for this layer in the box
above. 21.4 in my case. We don't want
any defects, so we'll subtract another
10 to 20% depending on how risky you
feel. With that, our final value is 17
mm/s.
That's a 40% speed increase compared to
the basic value of 12. If you like that
detailed type of content so far, leave a
like, subscribe, or comment below.
There's a lot more to come. Like before,
create a new project. Don't save
anything and add the new maximum flow
rate to your filament settings at the
very bottom. Then hit save to update
your filament setting. If you are ever
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Next up is Pressure Advance. Very
Correct Pressure Advance / K-value settings!
important, but lots of people get it
wrong. Pressure advance is there to
control the nozzle pressure during
acceleration and deceleration to prevent
under extrusion and blobs leading to one
uniform print line on fast printers.
This is what some printers do
automatically at the start of each
print. Doing it once manually is better
and saves filament in the long run. If
we press calibrate and select pressure
advance, we first select our extruder
type. We also get three different test
options. I would always choose PA
pattern as PA tower is weird to
calculate or diagnose and PA line can be
quite build plate dependent in most
cases. We can keep the range settings as
they are. Perfectionists can also do
smaller steps but flexible filaments
like TPU can go up to 0.5 and value. Now
the most important part even
professionals in my consulting get wrong
all the time is setting speed and
acceleration correctly. In general, I
would recommend using your outer wall
speed and acceleration here as those are
the features we see the most. But if we
have low max flow rate of example 10 c
mm/s, our printer will never reach this
outer wall speed. To check our real max
speed, we quickly right click, add any
basic shape, and make it very large.
Now, slice it and select speed from the
drop- down menu. We'll pull the
horizontal slider to the outer wall
and check the speed in the box. This is
the value you should enter for low max
flow rate filament. Back to our high
flow filament, we enter 200 mm/s as we
can really reach this value and 5,000
for acceleration.
Let's generate the test and print it
out. We'll also turn off the automatic
pressure advanced calibration just to be
safe. Our test shows they used flow rate
and acceleration in the bottom right
corner for this test. Look at the corner
with very little or no gaps, but we also
want the corner to be sharp. This is our
best corner and value. So, we just
follow the line to read the
corresponding pressure advance value.
Don't hesitate to choose values in
between two if you think that's best.
Now let's go back into our slicer.
Generate a new project. Don't save
anything and go to filament settings to
enable pressure advance and enter the
new value. Then hit save to update your
filament setting. For other slicers,
this might be in a different location.
For example, in Bamboo Studio, go to
calibration, select manage results, and
add your filament settings and a new
pressure advanced value, also known as
factor K. Now, under device, we can
press edit filament, select the correct
one, and use the correct K value. I like
Orca's way a lot more. It's very
important to keep in mind that this
value is only perfect for one speed and
acceleration. To be more precise, one
flow rate and acceleration. For example,
the same flow rate but a lower
acceleration already leads to a
different pressure advance value. The
further off, the worse this gets. The
easy fix for that problem is setting all
speeds and accelerations to our
calibrated values except the top layers.
This is what I do and is a good solution
for most of us. But for small objects or
overhangs, our printer will still slow
down and then use the wrong pressure
advance value which can reduce print
quality. We can still fix that, but this
is for advanced users only. So feel free
Adaptive Pressure Advance Calibration Guide
to skip to the next chapter or just
listen. Flow rate is mainly influenced
by speed, layer height, and line width.
But this is a huge rabbit hole. Adaptive
pressure advance uses multiple PA values
to model perfect values for different
flows and accelerations in any
situation. Currently, Adaptive Pressure
Advance only works with machines that
have Clipper firmware at the core. It's
best to check this for your individual
machine, and this might also change in
the near future. In the calibration tab,
we can add multiple speed and
acceleration values. It's recommended to
use a low speed. your highest speed and
at least one value in between. We'll
also add the top layer acceleration and
the outer wall acceleration. Usually,
it's recommended to have at least three
values here. In my case, this leads to
six different test prints. Just like
before, we select the best pressure
advance value for each one. You know
what to look out for at this point.
We'll also write down the corresponding
flow and acceleration in that order.
We'll need that in a second. Back in
Orca Slicer, enable adaptive pressure
advance and enter all collected values.
One line is one set of values. Again,
use commas for separation. You can also
use half of your lowest PA value for
bridges and enable PA for overhangs if
your PA model works reliably. The Orca
wiki says that this hasn't been tested
with Bamboo Lab, so I tried it myself.
Sadly, this little test cube shows
multiple artifacts that are not present
with normal settings. So, at the time of
making this video, this sadly doesn't
work with Bambool printers. For Clipper
printers, the results look exceptional,
and I think a future update from other
brands to support this would be amazing.
Best Flow Ratio Test To Fix Over/Under Extrusion
Next up is flow ratio. Very important
and simple if done correctly. The flow
ratio controls how much filament is
pushed through the nozzle to make a line
that has exactly the correct line width.
Two high values make our line too thick
and low values too thin. This makes a
huge difference in print quality. I
would always use the flow test yolo
recommended, but you can also do the
perfectionist version with smaller flow
steps. Doing the manual calibration of
your slicer by following each step is
fine as well. I think the Orca version
is easier to get right, but for the love
of God, do not do any of these caliber
flow ratio tests. They also measure
layer wobble, inconsistent extrusion,
and they are extremely susceptible to
calipiber measurement errors. Please
don't do it. My inner German dies a
little every time I see it. In Orca
Slicer, we select the test slice and
send it to the printer. Make sure any
automatic flow calibrations are still
disabled. For this test, we get 11
different values. We can immediately see
over extrusion for very high values and
still some overextrusion for zero flow
ratio change. Around minus0.02
looks okay and minus0.05
shows under extrusion gaps. We are
looking for the sample that has a smooth
surface and no gaps between lines. A
slightly visible main ring is fine.
minus.02 looks almost perfect and
minus.03
shows some very tiny gaps. So, we'll
just choose the value of minus0.025
in between. Back in the Orca slicer
filament settings, we check our flow
ratio and add the selected value. It's a
negative value in my case, leading to
0.955
flow ratio. We enter and save our
settings like before. We'll look at the
huge quality difference in a minute. In
very rare cases, the highest or lowest
value might still not be enough. In this
case, just add 0.05 to your base flow
ratio and then run the test again. It's
Don't Ignore Retraction Distance Settings!
that simple. Next up is retraction
distance. Often overlooked, but can have
a huge impact. Retraction distance
controls how far our filament is pulled
back between different print lines,
essentially leading to clean start and
end lines. In the Orca calibration tab,
click on retraction test. Direct
extruder printers can always leave the
standard settings. For Bowden tube
printers, set the end value to 6 mm and
increase the step value to reduce the
test print time. Like before, we hit
okay and print it out. For this test
print, our retraction distance increases
with each ring. We are looking for the
first rings that have no stringing or
oozing blobs. Also, make sure that the
seam at the side is clear at this step
height. Filaments can get worse with
higher values. So, always choose good
lower values, but never zero. In some
cases, high retraction values can also
lead to tiny outer wall holes, which
look extremely similar to wet filament
errors. So really keep retraction
distance low if possible. For my white
filament around four to five ring height
looks best overall. Back in the slicer
preview, we enable the code preview and
collapse the line type window. Now we
drag the vertical slider down to the
best ring height. Then we look for this
G-code line with a used retraction
length at the end. You can alternatively
use this formula for the same result,
but that's completely up to you. In
filament settings, we go to the settings
override tab and enter the new
retraction length. Then hit save
settings one more time. Let's finally
Before And After Full Filament Calibration
test our new settings compared to the
old ones by adding and printing an orca
cube. We'll use the same print profile
and also enable don't slow down outer
walls for all prints to make it a fair
comparison. Let's start with our white
PLA. We can immediately see way cleaner
layer lines for the calibrated filament
on the right, which is largely due to
the correct flow ratio. The corners are
sharp on both prints as the standard
pressure advance value is by chance the
exact same as our calibrated one. This
is rarely the case though. Our top
surface also looks way better and we can
even hear the difference when I scrape
it with my wooden finger. Under more
natural lighting conditions, the
calibrated filament looks almost
perfect. Other slicer settings could
improve this even more. As shown in my
other videos, keep in mind, we can also
print 40% faster with the calibrated
filament due to the higher max flow
rate. The TPU filament went from
borderline unprintable to excellent. We
get no more blobs due to the correct
lower max flow rate. Our top surface has
no more under extrusion and looks
extremely clean and smooth. We get
sharper corners all around the print as
well due to the correct pressure advance
value. These light discolorings of the
walls can be improved by reducing the
fan speed for this specific filament
like shown on the right. This line right
here is a shrink line. I showed how to
fix this in my previous video if you
ever struggle with that. Overall, the
calibration made a huge difference for
both filaments and is a big reason why
my designs I upload online look clean in
all my photos and videos. Thank you to
everyone who supports my channel by
More Tips You Should Remember for Calibration
downloading or selling these. Now, a few
more things to keep in mind are
different machines, nozzles or extruders
lead to different calibration results.
Don't just copy stuff you see online.
The same filament but in a different
color very often has extremely similar
calibration results, but not always.
Different brands always have different
results. You can enter all calibration
settings in any slicer. The names might
just be a little different. And we only
have to do calibration once for each
filament. After that, keep all automatic
calibrations off like shown. Try these
tips for your own prints and comment
below if this video has helped you out.
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