Perfect is the enemy of good.

This must be why I never like the good guys!

Do some poking around for your printer and slicer - for your printer, you need to know if you have a direct drive or Bowden tube setup, and for your slicer, you need to figure out how to modify the standard gcode.

Looking at some pictures online I’m pretty sure your printer is a direct drive. Again I’m not familiar with your slicer so I don’t know what your model looks like, but typically retraction tests will be a tower with different values printed on the side indicating how far the retraction distance is. For a direct drive, these values should be pretty small, likely topping out at just a couple mm at most.

A search for " <slicer name> retraction tower setup" should get you numerous tutorials for your slicer, just follow those guides and input a range appropriate to your setup and should be good to go

I can confirm this. I’m not a wolf expert, or even seen that many wolves really, but I have a dog and I don’t think she’d wear a bonnet.

Reg, why’d you just stab yourself in the shoulder?

Ah cmon, ain’t ya ever seen a movie?

Well of course I’ve seen a movie, but what the hell are ya doing?

Every time the guy stabs himself in a movie, it’s right before he kicks the piss outta the guy he’s fightin’!

Well that don’t… when that happens, the guys gotta plan Reg, what the hell’s your plan?

I dunno, but I’m gonna find out!

If it looks good enough, why bother?

good enough

You do understand what community you’re in, right? ;)

I don’t use orca slicer so I’m not familiar with how it works specifically, but are you sure that the retraction settings are actually changing between different sections? I made the mistake when I first started it just loading the model and letting it print with default settings from my slicer. If the GitHub doesn’t specify exactly how to enable the retraction tower settings, I would look up a guide on YouTube. If you’ve done temp towers, it’ll likely be set up in a similar fashion.

If your test starts at 0 and you don’t see any difference, it definitely it not working as intended; 0 retraction with result in a huge stringy mess, and going to the next step will be a significant change.

Edit: also maybe make sure that you are using the correct values for testing according to your extruder setup; if you are using a direct drive retraction tower on a bowden setup, the changes will be too small to make any discernible difference, and the lowest setting on a bowden test will likely be too high for a direct drive.

Extrusion works by the motor pushing the filament forward, causing pressure behind the nozzle, and the filament melting and extruding out the end. When your printer wants to stop extruding ( ie moving to a new part or section to print without printing anything in the middle), it makes a retraction to pull the filament back, releasing the pressure behind the nozzle, and stopping the filament from extruding out.

In a perfect world, a full retraction would not be necessary; not pushing the filament forward should stop the pressure buildup, and stop the filament from flowing. However, we don’t live in a perfect world, and so backing the filament up a small amount is necessary to stop it from flowing.

Finding out exactly how much you need to back the filament up is the purpose of this test. Back the filament up too much, and you can create clogging issues, extrusion issues caused by the filament not being at the end of the nozzle at the beginning of the extrusion, and (slightly) increased print time; don’t back the filament up far enough, and filament will continue extruding out the nozzle, causing stringing.

The test works by having you lower your retraction distance to a very small number ( a lot of tests will have you disable retraction altogether, ie 0 mm), and slowly increase it from there. The idea is that the bottom of the tower will look like hot garbage, and slowly improve as the retraction increases; what’s the quality stops improving, you know that that is your ideal retraction distance.

If you have a Bowden tube setup, a good retraction Tower would have values ranging from 0 mm to around 10 mm. Direct drive extruders need far less retraction; 0 to 2 mm in 0.2 mm increments should be good. Again, you’re looking for the first setting that gets rid of stringing.

Let me know if you need any help or have further questions! Retraction can be really tricky to understand mechanically, but can be important for improving print quality and reducing the need for post-processing.

Fantastic! My first thought was either a miniature display table or maybe a small parts case-and-table combo.

Nice! This is really impressive for a first prototype print. I’ve been printing for over a year, designing small brackets and such for maybe 6 months, and most of my designs are just one solid piece. Something with moving parts is awesome!

Can we ask what the project this is for is, or for a link to this model?

Yeh, but unless I uproot my life and move to a different country, I’m stuck doing it, so I can either bitch and moan about how much I hate it, or have the best time I can doing it 🤷🏾‍♂️

I’m a car guy and far from manly. I drive a loud annoying stick shift because it’s fun and life is too short to be bored while driving.

Stealthburner ended up fixing your clog issues entirely?

More or less. You can check my post history, made a lot of fuss about it here trying to get it squared away, in part it was caused by some magically reoccurring issue where my printer boards were reporting incorrect hotend temps (sometimes off by as much as 70°C). But even after fixing that side of things my old setup kept clogging; kept diagnosing back and forth between extruder and hotend, decided why not build a stealthburner and replace both, if that doesn’t fix the problem then I’m part way done with building a voron.

Now I’m building the voron anyways, haha

I found this instruction of assembly pretty entertaining. “Break it and try again without breaking it”.

Actually have the SB already on the current printer. It was having extrusion issues for the better part of 3 months and I built it as a last ditch effort to save the printer from the closet. After building that I realized how much I loved the voron designs and once the printer started acting up again I made the decision to just start piece mailing a 2.4

I suppose it could be a power issue based on that. That’s the same article I linked in the OP; my klippy.log shows that it loses connection with the MCU, then a few lines later I get the EOF error.

Printer is finishing the third 4 hour print with klipperscreen device unplugged. Really leaning towards this route, I’ll try swapping my nice power supply in when I get home and see if that helps.

Pi is not OC’ed, but I did just realize that it’s running on a power supply that came in a cheap starter kit and not the nicer one I’d ordered, so maybe that’s an issue. You would think the Pi would report under voltage if that were the case though, no? When Klipper errors out, the pi doesn’t shut off or report any issues.

I will say that I’ve completed two 4 hour long prints with all external USB devices disconnected, and when I tried a duplicate of one of the completed prints with the klipperscreen device (on a new nice cable) and my webcam (connected but not enabled via crowsnest) it failed after 3 hours.

It’s all good. I think there might be some sort of import fee specific to this type of item, most of the Chinese vendors have them for $30-50 with $100+ shipping.

There is a listing on Amazon that’s around $85 after one of those coupon things, with free shipping. Seems to be the best deal I can find.

Just as a heads up, in case you ever wanted to order these (or anyone else is viewing this post and is looking to source extrusions), the price for the frame is around $20, the cost for shipping to the US is around $110.

No other printer to test with, no. Coincidentally, the parts I am trying to print are for a voron 2.4, because I’m absolutely tired of dealing with all the issues I’ve had with this one (see post history).

It did not :( the print ran for 53 minutes before the error kicked in.

Interestingly, and this has happened several times now, the print ran perfectly fine until I checked on it. I know it sounds crazy, but I’d say that 75% of the errors occur right after checking the status of the print. Knowing this, I started the print via Klipperscreen, then turned the Klipperscreen device off. I verified the print started via mainsail on my main computer, then closed the tab and let the print run. After ~50 minutes, I used my phone to load mainsail and verify the print was still running; it was. 2 minutes later, I refresh the mainsail screen on my phone and the print has failed.

I will say that prints have failed both with a mainsail page constantly loaded, as well as with no mainsail or klipper interface loaded, so it can’t be caused entirely by that. However, since the problem started happening more consistently, it’s a pretty good chance that when it does fail, it’s within a minute of loading one of those interfaces.

I’d never heard of the blocking the 5v trick before. If the current test fails I might give that a go.

Power brick for the pi is good. It isn’t the official one, but a highly reviewed one, and I never get voltage warnings like I did on the old one.

To be honest sounds like you’ve got a gremlin jumping from one piece of equipment to another

You must have seen my other posts.