A question about speed and temperature.

Here last week-end I connected the printer, a Afinibot A3, and began to heat it up for the first time. I do have some STL-files and my choice was a round block. After slicing and temperature check I used the print command. I could see that the extruder was moving in ovals and not in circels until it was almost done. I have sent the picture to where I bought the printer and the sellers answer was:" You are running too fast or too cold". The print is filled with air. Can someone make this error a little easier for me to understand?


  • Stay below 60mm/s then you are normally not too fast. Once you get good prints you can try if faster works.
    What is clear is that you do not extrude enough. There are many factors that can go wrong:
    - Wrongs steps per mm in extruder
    - Wrong extrusion multiplier in firmware or in slicer settings
    - Extruding too cold so it does not extrude as much as it should. In that case you normally hear noises from extruder motor loosing steps.

    Hotter temperature makes filament easier to extrude so you need less force to do so. Printing faster you need also faster extrusion which is what your seller meant with his comment. But on the other side you should also not extrude too hot. But PLA for example has quite some range where it works.

    The steps per mm and extrusion multiplier change how many steps the extruder will make to extrude. If you want it to such in 10mm filament and it does only 5mm you are missing 50% of volume. So that must match. Normally you calibrate steps per mm to match values and for prebuild printers I expect it to be set more or less correctly.

    In slicer you set an extrusion multiplier to compensate dwelling of filament. PLA has a factor of around 0.85 or 85%. Some more some less. Hosts have also a multiplier which gets added, but that is normally set to 100% so it is neutral.

  • Thank you for your answer. There is really a lot more to study and learn. In settings/ printer there is a line "Travel feet rate" at the value of 4800 is that a value that shall be unchanged? The seller also adviced me to use Cura but that program has done something so the computer and printer will not "talk" anymore so I have to start over again with a new win installation
  • This is speed in in mm/min so factor 60. Means 80mm/s. For travel it is ok, print speed is the critical thing.

    But we are not Cura support! Can't say anything to Cura only Repetier-Host.
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