6.6. Fighting Stringing Part 2: Calibrating retraction settings

Stringing is one of biggest frustrations in 3D printing. In these notes, I’ll summarize simple steps to reduce stringing by calibrating slicer retraction settings.

Fighting fine stringing is one of the most frustrating problems to pin down, and our slicers provide numerous work-arounds to help us deal with this problem:

retraction and de-retraction length
retract/de-retract filament speeds
wiping
z-lift or z-hop
coasting (Cura)

Unfortunately, the testing process can be a long and tedious process. It is particularly frustrating to test individual small prints with different printer settings such as retraction.

Important

Be sure you’ve calibrated your slicer filament settings before trying to find the perfect retraction settings. Retraction and related settings are work-arounds for imperfect extrusion results. Calibrate your filament settings first to match your slicer extrusion settings to your real-world printer and filament settings first to reduce the number of work-arounds required to get good results.

One trick is to use a “virtual multi-extruder” printer profile to create a multi-part single print with unique hardware settings for each part.

Note

These notes are based on my experiences with the Prusa i3 Mk3 and Artillery/Evnovo Sidewinder X1 printers. If you are using a different printer, please verify the hardware details are similar.

The idea is to create a printer profile with multiple extruders and enter different settings for each extruder. Assign each part to a different extruder and you can (with a bit of patience) generate several tests with a single print as shown below.

Fig. 6.48 Retraction calibration print

It’s a little cumbersome, but it beats trying to track multiple tiny prints. Here’s an example showing several retraction setting modifications:

Retraction length is set to 0.2mm
Lift Z is set to 0mm
Retraction speed is set to 50mm/s
Deretraction speed is set to 25mm/s

Fig. 6.49 Extruder settings

Provided each part is small enough, you can produce a single print that compares multiple settings.

Fig. 6.50 Retraction calibration print results

Note

Thanks again @Ringarn67 for catching the filament override error in the sample file! I’ve removed the example settings for now to avoid confusion.

I use the following retraction settings as a starting point:

0.2-0.4mm retraction
0-0.2mm z-lift
50mm/s retract speed
25mm/s de-retract speeds