First, thanks for all the feedback and suggestions, I’ve been going through and looking for areas to tweak. I decided, in the interim, to print a bigger model to see if I can expose the issues more, and I think I accomplished that. This is the snail from Adventure Time, and I’m mostly very happy with this print; I could have added a tree support under the lower arm, but the detail is great and the layer lines are barely visible…until you get to the raised hand a bit, and to the eye stalks. Looking at what’s going on, it looks pretty clear the layers are NOT getting enough time to cool and harden before the next starts.
I thought I had that accounted for with the following settings, but as far as I can tell, these settings are not being respected:
I would expect the printer to slow down a bit to its minimum, then when the minimum layer time is reached, it would go off to the side…but I think instead it’s hovering close to the print and not giving it space to cool down.
I don’t really want to switch slicers, but I am wondering if there’s some Cura tip to uncover what I’m doing wrong here; I’ve read a ton but I am just not understanding how to get the printer to take its time on these tiny objects.
Here is a video of it printing, it’s clearly not respecting the minimum layer time: https://photos.app.goo.gl/nhE7LjvDH9avutxd7
The printer won’t park the nozzle by itself to let the layer cool down, but you can trick it into doing so by adding a purge tower or somesuch. It will waste some filament, but the alternative of a g-code script to park and wait will still have issues due to oozing and losing pressure in the nozzle.
Alternatively, printing multiple parts would also allow for more time per layer.
The minimum layer time setting is just the time until the slicer tries to start slowing down, but the minimum speed will still dictate the actual layer time. And lowering minimum speed also doesn’t help as the nozzle then spends more time near the part, heating and softening previous layers.