When in Doubt… Print a Japanese Lucky Cat
Or is it a Chinese lucky cat?
Does it really matter?
What matters is that this cat is not only meant to be lucky but also a Crealty Ender 3 V2 test print, to be printed when testing whether your printer is working correctly.
What’s wrong now — I hear you groan.
Surely, the weekend’s printing fun is evolving into successful printing adventures instead of continuing with my recent run of bad luck, bad handling, and user ignorance?
Who knows… maybe it’s a combination of all three.
What is a Test Print?
As it turns out, the cute little cat with a raised paw that all Crealty 3D printer owners print first is Maneki Neko (or beckoning cat) — a popular Japanese token of good luck. The aim of this test print is… you guessed it — to determine whether the printer is printing as it should.
It is also worth noting that this little cat is not the only test print that ships with the Crealty Ender 3 V2 printer. A second model, a small boat known as Benchy, checks various aspects of print quality.
Note to self: Maybe I should print Benchy instead of Maneki Neko. Will it make a difference?
The Backstory to Needing to Print a Test Print
As described in an earlier adventure — last week’s, I think — to what is turning out to be a very long saga — although, if I’m honest, this is the nature of 3D printing. Back to my earlier stories… I had such fun printing dog balls in lime green TPU — they are very rough (and look rough in the photo). I printed them in standard resolution with support. It turns out that removing rubbery supports from a model is not easy — As they are for my dogs, I didn’t fuss too much.
But I want to print a few balls as gifts for friends — they need to look better than they do now. Therefore, it’s time to improve the build quality substantially, creating a .gcode file instructing the printer to lay down more filament (among other commands).
Fortunately, I don’t need to write machine code. There is an app for that. So… fast-forward to the printing part of this process; I used Prusa Slicer and Cura to create high-density build files.
Why both?
Surely, this is duplicating the process.
Well… yes, it is.
I first created a .gcode file using Prusa Slicer and copied the file to my printer’s SD card, switched the printer on, and so on. Except this time, the print head moved to the back of the print bed and proceeded to print blobs of lime green rubbery filament.
Okay… this is weird…
I may have done something wrong when setting up the high-density print. Let me try Cura again.
Why? Surely both products create .gcode files?
To be honest, I find the Cura interface easier to work with. Maybe it’s something as simple as the blue UI looking easier to use than Prusa Slicer’s orange/brown UI.
You can imagine the result. This time, the lime green blobs were laid down on the far right-hand side of the print bed.
What now?
When in doubt about the way forward, go backward.
Note to self: This motto doesn’t work everywhere, but it does work in fields such as software development and solving nasty bugs, as well as here; ergo, reprint a successful model.
Well… in the spirit of a true misadventure, when starting the print, the printer’s x-gantry moved all the way up the z-axis and kept going. The bar at the top of the printer was the only thing stopping it. Otherwise, it would have continued like the elevator in the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl when the Great Glass Elevator rose out of the factory at the end of the story to fetch Charlie’s family from his house.
I wonder where my printer’s print head would have ended up.
But… I digress (my favorite words — it would seem).
Solving the Challenge
Another truism: When in doubt, consult the technician at the 3d printer’s tech hospital.
Suffice it to say that consulting Reddit is probably not the greatest idea. However, I’m sure that there are many Redditors with valuable advice, not so much in the 3D printing landscape.
The technician was stumped. The first question was: Is your printer connected to Octoprint? It isn’t — I have yet to set up Octoprint correctly so that it works well with my printer.
After sending a few emails back and forth, plus a video of the printer attempting to emulate the chocolate factory’s Great Glass Elevator and the .gcode files to make sure my settings were correct, it was decided to reset the printer’s firmware’s default settings.
The only settings I will have to reset are the printer’s e-steps because the extruder has been upgraded to a direct drive extruder. But… before I change the default e-steps setting, it is crucial to ensure the printer is printing correctly.
Hence, there is a need to print a Japanese lucky cat test print.
Hopefully, the end of this weekend’s misadventures will be that the test print prints correctly, and I can move forward.
How many printed models are on the cards for this weekend?
I really don’t know.
The caveat is that the printer runs off solar, and bad weather is predicted for the weekend. Therefore, we only use appliances that are absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, a 3D printer cannot be counted among these necessities.
