Cura Questions - Settings for Faster Prints!

Today on Kira Questions on the Tech Nervous channel, we are answering your questions about how to get more speed out of your Kira settings. So stick around and let's jump right into it. And I am back with another question. Today's question is from Catherine R Rosa. She says, thank you for the information, I just downloaded the new Kira and I have a question. I am new to 3D printer and I purchased a Creality CR-10 Smart. I don't actually know how to set up my Kira to do prints, I've been using CR-10S and oh my god the prints take so long. 20 hours and more, would you be able to help me out? Well have no fear, I am here to show you some tips and tricks for settings that will make your prints go faster. Now let's jump over to Kira and we will take a look at those directly. I'm going to go ahead and just go ahead and slice with my generic settings here. This is my standard profile. This profile does work with pretty much all Creality machines, it is my Ender 3 profile. You can find a download link for it around here somewhere. I would recommend giving that a try. You can see I'm printing this pawn in around 41 minutes. Now what can we do to make that print faster or slower? So let's see. First thing that comes to mind is the layer height. So let's take this, we'll take this up to 3.3 and we'll slice again. Our time should be significantly faster and I'll explain this to you why this isn't really recommended. So 24 minutes, we've cut it about in half by doubling our layer height. That means we're printing the model twice as fast, but it also means that our layers are going to be more visible. Now maybe that's not a big deal to you, maybe it's just a prototype, but if this is going to be a finished model, that is going to require more sanding to smooth it out and get it even. So generally leaving that below .16 is where you want to be. You can go a little higher than that. If I take this down to, let's just even do .08, I will have a really fine model. The layer lines will be barely visible, but it will take twice as long to print because I'm printing at half the layer height. So layer height is very important in determining how fast your model prints. You can see we're at 1 hour and 15 minutes, so let's add another half hour. I'm going to take that back to .16 because that's generally the range I'm in when I do my printing. And let's examine a few other things. Now a lot of this here is going to be determined by your speeds down here. You can alter these numbers, you can see this printer is printing at 115 millimeters a second, which is the regular speed, but you can see it's really only doing the infill at that speed. Walls are done at about half of that, as well as the supports, and then it's traveling at max travel speed. You can alter these, however, your walls, you're going to want to be going quite a bit slower than your infill because that is going to be the visible part of your model and you're going to want to be able to see nice finishes there and not any burring or zitting or anything like that. So that is also going to determine what the difference, what this can do for your speed. So if I have faster wall speed, adding walls will make my model print faster. Generally that's not the case, generally your infill prints faster, so the less walls you have the better, it'll increase your print speed. However, you don't want to go below a certain amount of walls in your shell because anything below three I tend to find that the infill pattern shows through on the outside and that is undesirable. So three is going to be pretty much the lowest you want to go standard and that will get you pretty much the fastest print that you can get. Now it's also important to note there are a few things about temperature here depending on which filament you're using that can be used to your advantage. Some filaments print a little faster at higher temperatures, it's just one of the things you're going to have to test per individual filament, but I wouldn't recommend playing around with the temperature and speed too much because they're designed to be printed in a certain range and that's generally listed on the label as well. A couple other things, enable retraction, I do have retraction turned on, that retracts the filament, that takes time, you're generally going to want to leave that on or you end up with blobbing and stringing, however depending on your machine you should be able to adjust this distance here. Now I believe if you're using a CR-10 you should have the same hotend as an Ender 3 in which case you're going to want 2.5 or 3.5 right here. And retraction speed is exactly what it says it is and basically the only thing in here that you can really do to save print time is this part right here. If this is checked it's going to calculate a path going around your models to make sure that the nozzle doesn't bump into the top of the model and that can add a lot, a lot of print time especially if you're doing support and things like that so turning this off will also increase your speed. Now all of this being said there is a trade off when using speed and increasing speed and using these settings because obviously with more speed generally the model is going to get lower and lower in quality, however there is a fine balance between printing a model at a decent speed and still getting something that is a nice object in the end and not hanging over with stringing and blobbing and things like that. So the most important thing is to test and test again, dial in your settings and then once you have those settings make sure that you're aware of what exactly they are because if the avoid printing parts while traveling is causing you a lot of time and it's also causing you problems turning it off because you're bumping into parts, that's something that you have to decide for yourself what's more important, the speed or the quality of the print without damage or the risk of losing the part because I mean if you're printing something for 20 hours and you're 19 hours in and it breaks, you've wasted those 19 hours. If you're printing something that takes 24 hours and it adds those 4 hours but you're saving yourself the stress of worrying whether or not it's going to knock into a piece of your model or remove it from the build plate and waste the entire time up until this point so it's a fine line to walk and something you kind of have to decide for yourself. But other than that I hope these tips were helpful and we'll see you in the next video guys don't forget to leave a like and hit that subscribe button, we do cure questions all the time and I'm happy to do them so if you have any questions leave them in the comments down below and we'll see you in the next one. Stick around guys I got another YouTube recommended video for you right here and if you haven't already subscribe, subscribe, subscribe, make sure that you smash that like button, we'll see you in the next one, Tech Nibbers out!