For joining parts, you could also consider friction welding. I’m not sure how easy it would be to fill a cavity, but bond strength would be great since you would also be the heating the original part.

Growing up I absolutely did not like classical music. Turns out it was the recording (bad micing of the orchestra) and mastering (the old "super quiet, super quiet, super quiet, briefly louder, super quirt thing). For mastering you could claim you’re being true to the original performance (lots of dynamic range), but when you’re listening to a live performance that’s all you’re doing and there’s no background noise.

Turns out I do like classical music, I just really didn’t like the way it was recorded and mastered back when I would be exposed to it as a kid.

Esteps and extrusion multiplier are related, but different, solutions to a similar problem. Changing one value by say 10% should be the same as changing the other by 10%.

Esteps is “how far does the extruder motor have to turn to extrude some length of filament”. This lets your slicer know how much plastic volume should be extruded per step of your extruder motor

Flow rate is “crap, different filaments expand/contract at different rates and have different physical characteristics like viscosity”.

This is why the extrusion multiplier setting is associated to your filament profile in PrusaSlicer and all its derivatives. I use a much lower value for ASA (around 0.88 if going slower and cooler) than PETG (0.95 ish) than PLA (1.0) than TPU (1.15 if memory serves).

I’ll also tweak my extrusion multiplier depending on how I’m printing. For example, right now I have an ASA print going. The printer is laying down filament at 30 mm^3/s. To do this I’m printing a bit hotter than I normally would with this filament (245 vs 230). I’m also at 0.92 EM vs my usual 0.88.

Sounds like your infill is curling up? Solid or sparse infill? If solid, it’s likely over extrusion as you said. If sparse, my suspicion is temperature and/or cooling related.

Dimensional accuracy doesn’t necessarily mean detail. What are your expectations? You should be able to get fairly crisp and dimensionally accurate prints, but there’s a ceiling. With FDM you’re ultimately running what could be considered a CNC hot glue gun so absolute accuracy won’t ever be as good as a resin or SLS printer.

Do your parts look good, but their dimensions are off? If yes, you probably need to scale your parts to accomodate for shrinkage. That’s what the Voron team did and their parts fit together really nicely with non-printed parts when printed on a decently tuned printer. Their threaded test prints are a pretty good indication of how well dialed in your printer is.

Some of this also comes down to temp and material, so if you had the perfect interface and changed material you might need to iterate a few times. There are also the design quirks that you learn as you go, especially for things like small holes in parts often being smaller printed than designed. Print a hole gauge set, with a series of holes ranging in size, and use the one whose printed - not designed - dimensions are the one you want.

Why are you looking to upgrade? Are you chasing detail, speed, or something else?

It’s the same thermistor value that I was using previously, but I did replace the thermistor when I installed the NH. This means I’m guilty of changing two things at once, which makes attributing cause hard.

I ran my first prints after the NH install yesterday and all went well, so I’m going to file this in an OCD annoyance vs something I need to worry about.

I agree with you on planned obsolescence, but I think there’s more to the story. The quantity of things/conveniences in our lives is greater than at any point in history. We have two younger kids and the quantity of… junk they have is astounding. As parents, we’ve sought out lower quality/throw away/gimmicky toys for things like goodie bags at birthday parties. Sticky hands, silicone squeeze toys, etc. To some extent, the internet is contributing to this since shipping and handling aren’t free and buying a single fidget spinner for $5 doesn’t sound like a good deal when you can get a bag of them for $8.

There are also plenty of instances of people replacing perfectly functional items because the newer version became available. People buy them for status or for a perceived increase in convince/quality. This is true for compute/tech, but has been extending into things like smart home (replacing a functional light-bulb, switch, doorbell, thermostat etc for a IoT device). I get that some people are into these things, but it seems disingenuous to say that the only thing driving this is planned obsolescence.

We have to move toward less carbon intensive means of production, but we also need to figure out how to change the endless stream of “better/faster/newer” that people feel compelled to purchase.

I think the idea was “reduce consumption”. As a society we buy tons of stuff, way more than 50 or 100 years ago.

I’ve run 15 kg or so of filmmaker ASA through my Voron.

Things I’ve learned:

1. Let your printer heat soak, especially if you’re printing a bigger part. Heat helps your print. It will also give your printer frame time to stabilize. My Voron grows in z as it heats up. I’ve printed multiple objects sequentially in one print without letting it heat soak and watched the first layers get worse and worse as the nozzle wound up further and further from the bed on each successive object
2. Clean your bed. IPA is all well and good, but dish soap, your fingers to clean, and paper towel to dry is better. If your PEI sheet is new, scuffing it up some isn’t a bad idea. You can use the rough side of a new yellow sponge for this, but you’ll want to make that sponge a cleaning sponge afterwards
3. Some shapes are more warp prone than others. If you design your own parts you can design around this to a certain extent. Avoid sharp corners and big aspect ratios (eg much wider than deep, etc)
4. A printing a draft shield around your part will probably help
5. Get your chamber warmer. You can do this with a mix of bed fans and insulation. My biggest print to date was pulled off with a 60 degree chamber. It had zero warping. My printer couldn’t hit that chamber temp stock

Other ideas:

• I’ve never used adhesive promotors on my bed
• Even with a part stuck to the bed, I’ve had it warp 4-5 inches above the bed and crack before I figured out how to get my chamber temp up
• With a big enough print I’ve pulled my bed plate up from the magnet thanks to warping. Again, the only solution I found for this was getting my chamber temp up
• I personally run my bed at 100 °C and haven’t had any issues
• I’ve found Polymaker’s ASA very easy to print on the cooler side, so I like to run it at 240 first layer/230 subsequent layers. Maybe try a temp tower? I was using 245 initially and was getting tons of wispy (super fine) stringing
• With a warmer chamber you can run more fan since you won’t be cooling the part as much

Huh, thanks for the additional info. On the hot side the reported temperature seems to be spot on so I’m not going to worry about cold temps being off.

Good to hear!

Thanks for the point of reference. Any idea what extruder and thermistor you have?

I measured my thermistor’s resistance when cold at 183 k ohms. This jives pretty well with the expected value per the data sheet. With the 2.2k ohm pullup resistor, this puts the A2D with 98.92 percent of Vref.

I tested against a known hot source (165 °F) and the printer reported the correct value. The resistance at this value is a lot lower. I suspect the NH’s A2D is slightly non-linear at the extremes of its range, which is fairly normal.

This adds even more credence to the idea of your nozzle being too close to your bed for your first layer.

The good news is that you’re running Klipper, so you can tune this very easily.

Go download a first layer patch from Ellis and use his guide as a reference.

The idea is to place 10 or so on the bed and adjust your z-offset on the fly until you get it right. Once you’ve found the correct amount update your printer.cfg.

I am less concerned about the board temp and much more curiosity about the reported temporary difference between the extruder and bed.

I totally agree that the nitehawk PCB temp is quite possibly normal.

Agree that this seems like a bigger than desired difference.

Thanks for the point of reference. I am going to be doing some measuring and math tonight to try to figure out where the source of error is and how much it might/not matter when hot.

Before nitehawk I was using the same hot end and I copied the thermistor type from my prior config while setting up. The bed and extruder were much closer to each other when cold then.

Oh, that ` was me fighting with markdown to get the code portion of the post nicely formatted. I couldn’t figure out newlines and gave up.

I don’t think heat is getting to the extruder via the NH. The thermistor is potted in a m3 bung that’s threaded into the extruder. The extruder itself is at ambient a few mm away.

They’re 104nt’s. I have never calibrated a thermistor for one of my printers before, other than updating the firmware (compile marlin, config Klipper) and choosing the appropriate value.

I did dig up a datasheet for the thermistor, will have to check resistance tonight.

Was going to make the same recommendation!