Running a print

This is an ordinary print, start to finish. Setting up a new machine is First boot checklist; this is what you do the hundredth time.

Most of it is preparation, and most print failures are decided before the machine starts moving.

Before you load anything

Clean the bed. No debris, no residue where the part goes. If the last coat is depleted, reapply it — see Bed adhesion sprays.

If you are changing material, clean the hopper. Only then — a hopper running the same material as last time needs nothing. See Hopper cleaning.

Check the tubes are empty. This is the step that gets skipped, and it is why the first prints after a material change come out mixed. The feed line holds pellets of the old material after the hopper is empty — see Material change and purge.

Load and purge

Load the material the print needs, dried and fed from the dryer — see Loading pellets and Starting the dryer.

Purge if you need to. Coming from a different material or a different colour, purge at the temperature of the hotter of the two, and keep going until what comes out is clean.

Check the nozzle in the machine is the nozzle in the profile. A 3 mm nozzle running a 1.8 mm profile will print, and everything about it will be wrong: layer height, line width, flow. Look at the machine, then look at the printer profile in the slicer, and make them agree.

Slice

Open the model, pick the printer profile for the nozzle you just checked, pick the material, pick the process — then work through the process settings that matter. The full tour is The Ginger Slicer window.

Before sending it, look at the preview. Slice, then step through the views: layer time, fan speed, travel moves, layer height, flow. That is where you see what the machine will actually do — see Checking the slice.

Send it

With the printer on the same network, upload straight from the slicer — no USB stick, no copying files by hand. Set up once and it stays set up: Connecting Ginger Slicer to the G1.

Watch the first layers

This is the part worth standing there for. Three things, and the order matters.

Is the first layer right? Squashed and glassy means too low; round and rope-like means too high. Adjust the live Z offset from the display while it prints — see Z offset and first layer.

Is the material dry? Foam, bubbles, a crackling or popping sound: the pellets are wet. Stop, dry them properly, start again — a whole print made from wet material is a whole print wasted. See PETG foaming and moisture.

Are the layers over- or under-extruded? Lines that bulge and touch, or lines with gaps between them. Which brings you to the check that has to come first.

Measure the first layer before you touch Rotation Volume

Over- or under-extrusion is the reason people reach for Rotation Volume, and it is the wrong first move.

Measure the first layer with a caliper and compare it with the layer height set in the slicer. If they do not match, the fault is the Z offset, not the flow — a first layer printed too low looks over-extruded, and one printed too high looks under-extruded, on a machine whose flow is perfectly calibrated.

Fix the Z offset, print again, measure again. Only if the measured height matches the slicer and the extrusion is still wrong does Rotation Volume come into it — see Rotation Volume calibration.

Change Rotation Volume to fix a Z offset problem and you have miscalibrated the material for every print after this one.

You can measure this because the layers here are millimetres thick. Filament printers judge a first layer by eye because nobody can measure 0.2 mm reliably; on this machine you can simply measure it, so there is no reason to guess.

While it runs

Once the first layers are right, there is little to do. The things worth a glance:

• The dryer is still running, and its guillotine is still open
• Material is arriving — the vacuum cycling with nothing reaching the hopper is a feeding fault, see Hopper suction problems
• The zones are holding temperature — the graph in Mainsail shows a wandering zone before you see it in the part

When it finishes

Wait for the bed to come back to room temperature, then lift the part off — see Removing the print.

Related notes

• First boot checklist — the first print on a new machine
• The Ginger Slicer window — the slicing half, in detail
• Z offset and first layer
• Rotation Volume calibration
• Removing the print
• Print quality — which page — when it comes out wrong