Obligatory “I got a 3d printer for Christmas” and I’m absolutely loving it, fell down the rabbit hole head first. However I’m currently dealing with an issue where my Neptune 4 Pro is slowing down to 7 mm/s when it is printing the outer walls despite being setup in Cura to print at 25mm/s. Filament is Overture PETG. Pictures show the Neptune touchscreen with the 7mm/s speed shown in the bottom left and a screengrab of the speed settings from Cura. Any help is greatly appreciated!
Yeah. The general speed that you set isn’t necessarily the speed that your printer will print at. That might be the max speed you might get in the best situation or location.
For example, depending on the settings, first layer, outer walls, bridges and other parts of the model cann all be printed at a lower speed to preserve quality. Your print head also needs to accelerate and decelerate for every corner so that it doesn’t overshoot and go where it should. So low acceleration/deceleration play also a part. And the model itself has to be considered in this too because long, mostly straight lines can accelerate to that speed and stay on it for longer.
So what you set as “speed” in the slicer is mostly not what you actually get. Some slicers have a speed display with a colour gradient after you sliced it so that you can see which parts are faster or slower.
The only thing you can really do about it is to do test prints and slowly push the speed up as far as you can to get a decent quality at a nice speed. But you can still end up in parts where you would be fairly slow.
Thank you for the detailed explanation! I actually was unaware that Cura was doing that much work in the background, it’s still just a magic math box that spits out gcode in my mind. I’ll start learning more about my slicer instead of endlessly scrolling thingiverse. Thanks again!