Tuning and Speeding up Prints

     OK so Scott here again  and while I have been busy working on getting my new office / lab around I figured I would take a little time to put together a new short article based a few of my facebook post as a way to help the community tune their printers and speed up their prints. 

    one thing to remember is even if you have 2 printers brand new out of the box exact same make model everything both will need their own tune because of the variance in each part or piece in the printer. 

When it comes to tuning it should be the exact same steps to tune the X5S as an I3. 

Temp tower for each filament.
extrusion multiplier /flow rate
print speed
retract settings 
     All need checked and adjusted and depending on the first print as to which one you adjust and what affect it has on the end print. These effects will then tell you what to adjust for the next test.

     You can speed up the print speed but there are a few things you really should do first regardless of what printer you have...
1. Adjust stepper drivers  
2. Make sure printer is square an true in all directions
3. Make sure belts are TIGHT 
4. Look up and read through all the print quality adjustment articles you can find to know what settings to adjust to fix the issues that come up.
5. Make sure all axis are calibrated correctly so 10mm is 10mm in all directions and the extruder. Calibration cube is a good start for everything but extruder here
6. Print a temp tower for every filament so you have a known good starting point for temp.
     Start with a print speed you know works good and tune the slicer and printer at that speed... Once it prints perfect speed it up say 10mms at a time adjusting settings as needed until you get to the point you can't adjust the settings to make it print perfect then back it down to the last known good speed (should only be 10mms slower). That will give you your printers Max printing speed. Now some items will be hardware related and you need to know what to look for like not enough tension on the filament at the extruder causing under extrusion.
Below are a few useful links.
http://customize-3d.com/stepper-driver-current-adjustment 
https://www.simplify3d.com/support/print-quality-troubleshooting/#not-extruding-enough-plastic
http://customize-3d.com/tronxy-hotend-assembely-rebuild.html

     I recommend printing this design or something close to it for tuning as it allows you to see more than other designs I have seen. Yes it takes more time to print than some other but I'm use it because it gives me a little to adjust for a lot of settings at once and when you know what each setting does you know what to adjust and fix in each area.
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1363023

      I will try to go into each area of this in more detail later  with more articles on exactly how I do each step but I figured for now This will get you a good start on tuning the slicer and printer.