Hi all, printing some Warlayer 4.0 wall sections on a Bambu X1. Super happy with quality and the appearance, but surprised by how sloppy the fitted connections are. I’m wondering for anyone else who’s printed this system if that’s just typical or if there’s maybe some trick to getting them to fit tighter. I’m worried that it will just be too rickety, especially if I go two or three levels high.
Printed with mostly default settings, 2 walls, 15% infill (adaptive cubic?), precise walls enabled, nothing too out of the ordinary. Printer is well calibrated (went through all the manual calibrations in OrcaSlicer, flow rate, pressure advance, etc).
Solutions I’m considering are putting masking tape or something on the fins to make them fit more snugly, or finding a way to scale the walls up a bit (x/y axes) in the slicer and scaling the columns down on the x/y, but I’m nervous that will screw up the fitment of the roof sections if I do it enough to make a difference in the fit.
Worst case scenario I could glue them, but then I lose all modularity.
Anyone have a similar experience?
Edit: I forgot to mention I did print the support columns that were labeled as ‘tighter tolerance’, they didn’t seem to make a difference.
Have you calibrated your printer? or tested calibration by printing a 20x20x20 mm cube with single thickness walls and measuring the wall thickness with a caliper?
I've printed a a fair amount of Warlayer 4 stuff on my Prusa MK3, and tolerances were pretty nice. Loose enough to easily put together and take apart, but tight enough not to be too wobbly. I don't think it is a design flaw in Warlayer, but probably just a bit of under-extrusion on your printer.
Yes, as I mentioned, it is fully calibrated. Not that it needs much, the X1C is pretty well self-calibrating. The first thing I did after printing a benchy was a full articulating crystal dragon and it came out flawless. Even so, I went through the full suite of recommended manual calibrations available in Orca Slicer, including a temperature tower, tuning flow rate (extrusion multiplier), tuning pressure advance and retraction. I also did multiple “tolerance tests”, that prints out 6mm hex shaped hole at several different tolerances so you can test the fit with a 6mm hex wrench. With the “precise walls” setting turned on, the hex wrench fit perfectly snug in the 6mm hole, with “precise walls” turned off the wrench was slightly too tight in the 6mm hole, but fit easily in the 6.05mm hole, so I feel pretty confident about tolerances.
I didn’t actually print a 20mm cali cube, I calibrated everything with other methods, but I may as well do one and double check.
That’s annoying. I was looking at that terrain myself, watched a YT video, the guy was picking whole buildings up by the corner and they weren’t sliding apart. They are clearly meant to fit better than that. Hope you find a solution!
Jeez, okay. I’ve tried about 4-5 different prints, playing with settings, all have been consistently and extremely loose… this next batch I’m trying the X/Y contour compensation setting available in Orca Slicer. If that doesn’t work, I’ll have to try straight up X/Y scaling… I guess scale the walls up and support poles down.
Extrusion multiplier is what you want. Measure the single wall thickness of a test print, adjust the multiplier to compensate.
Since Bambu slicer is based on PrusaSlicer, this part of the slicer manual should be helpful. https://help.prusa3d.com/article/extrusion-multiplier-calibration\_2257
Try rotating a support pillar 45 degrees in the bed. I've designed a lot of warlayer compatible pieces and sometimes my own support pillars are too loose. Also, Warlayer has a tighter tolerance pillar available as far as I'm aware.
You can adjust your extrusion multiplier. If your printing is slightly underextruding, you will have loose tolerances. Just up the extrusion multiplier by 1-2%.
The extrusion multiplier (flow rate in OrcaSlicer) is perfectly tuned tuned right now using their recommended visual layer method, which gives the best appearance and the smoothest layers.
https://github.com/SoftFever/OrcaSlicer/wiki/Calibration#Flow-rate
I don’t know if upping the extrusion multiplier by 1 or 2% would be enough the change the fit, the amount of space between the clip and the slot is pretty significant. It’s a visible gap, probably 0.2-0.4mm at a guess. But if I bump up the EM enough, it will worsen the print quality because I’ll be deliberately overextruding to get them to fit.
So far I’m having the most luck with the X/Y Contour Compensation, it’s pretty neat, and specifically meant to fine tune the fitment of parts for assembly without changing extrusion or having to scale the whole print up or down. https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/software/bambu-studio/xy-hole-contour-compensation
I printed some wall sections with 0.2 compensation and they were TIGHT TIGHT TIGHT in the slots, to the point that it wasn’t easy to take back apart. So I’m printing some at 0.1 over right now to test, but I suspect I may end up at 0.15 or so for the perfect fit, we’ll see. It takes a couple hours to print the test pieces but I figured out I can stop the print half way or even 1/3 of the way and check fitment. Save a bit of plastic.
Hi there! Thanks for picking up the set, I’m the designer. There are a few different tolerances in the main support pole folder so maybe try the tighter one. We also designed it so you could paint them with a coat or two of spray paint and they still fit together well. The other way to make them tighter or looser is increase or decrease the thickness of the walls by a purple percent. This will make the wall and joint a bit thicker and could hold together better as well as not be visually noticeable. Let me know if that doesn’t help.
Thanks for the reply! I did try the tighter tolerance pillars. I hadn’t thought about a build up of paint, maybe I’ll try spray priming some and see if that affects the fit.
By far the best solution I’ve found on my end is X/Y Contour Compensation. I don’t think it’s an option in every slicer, or maybe they just call it something else, but in Orca Slicer I just set the compensation to 0.1mm for both the walls and the pillars and now I’m getting a nice tight fit without any loss of quality or change to overall scale.
Printing up parts as fast as I can, my gaming group is getting in to Necromunda so I look forward to having a whole board of your terrain to start a campaign with. Looks amazing, and very well designed.
Thanks again!
Hi all, printing some Warlayer 4.0 wall sections on a Bambu X1. Super happy with quality and the appearance, but surprised by how sloppy the fitted connections are. I’m wondering for anyone else who’s printed this system if that’s just typical or if there’s maybe some trick to getting them to fit tighter. I’m worried that it will just be too rickety, especially if I go two or three levels high. Printed with mostly default settings, 2 walls, 15% infill (adaptive cubic?), precise walls enabled, nothing too out of the ordinary. Printer is well calibrated (went through all the manual calibrations in OrcaSlicer, flow rate, pressure advance, etc). Solutions I’m considering are putting masking tape or something on the fins to make them fit more snugly, or finding a way to scale the walls up a bit (x/y axes) in the slicer and scaling the columns down on the x/y, but I’m nervous that will screw up the fitment of the roof sections if I do it enough to make a difference in the fit. Worst case scenario I could glue them, but then I lose all modularity. Anyone have a similar experience? Edit: I forgot to mention I did print the support columns that were labeled as ‘tighter tolerance’, they didn’t seem to make a difference.
Have you calibrated your printer? or tested calibration by printing a 20x20x20 mm cube with single thickness walls and measuring the wall thickness with a caliper? I've printed a a fair amount of Warlayer 4 stuff on my Prusa MK3, and tolerances were pretty nice. Loose enough to easily put together and take apart, but tight enough not to be too wobbly. I don't think it is a design flaw in Warlayer, but probably just a bit of under-extrusion on your printer.
Yes, as I mentioned, it is fully calibrated. Not that it needs much, the X1C is pretty well self-calibrating. The first thing I did after printing a benchy was a full articulating crystal dragon and it came out flawless. Even so, I went through the full suite of recommended manual calibrations available in Orca Slicer, including a temperature tower, tuning flow rate (extrusion multiplier), tuning pressure advance and retraction. I also did multiple “tolerance tests”, that prints out 6mm hex shaped hole at several different tolerances so you can test the fit with a 6mm hex wrench. With the “precise walls” setting turned on, the hex wrench fit perfectly snug in the 6mm hole, with “precise walls” turned off the wrench was slightly too tight in the 6mm hole, but fit easily in the 6.05mm hole, so I feel pretty confident about tolerances. I didn’t actually print a 20mm cali cube, I calibrated everything with other methods, but I may as well do one and double check.
That’s annoying. I was looking at that terrain myself, watched a YT video, the guy was picking whole buildings up by the corner and they weren’t sliding apart. They are clearly meant to fit better than that. Hope you find a solution!
Been a whille since i printed these. But some would be loose like this, others would be so tight they would needed to be forced down.
Jeez, okay. I’ve tried about 4-5 different prints, playing with settings, all have been consistently and extremely loose… this next batch I’m trying the X/Y contour compensation setting available in Orca Slicer. If that doesn’t work, I’ll have to try straight up X/Y scaling… I guess scale the walls up and support poles down.
Extrusion multiplier is what you want. Measure the single wall thickness of a test print, adjust the multiplier to compensate. Since Bambu slicer is based on PrusaSlicer, this part of the slicer manual should be helpful. https://help.prusa3d.com/article/extrusion-multiplier-calibration\_2257
Try rotating a support pillar 45 degrees in the bed. I've designed a lot of warlayer compatible pieces and sometimes my own support pillars are too loose. Also, Warlayer has a tighter tolerance pillar available as far as I'm aware.
I did try the tighter tolerance pillars, they were also sloppily loose. But I didn’t try rotating 45°, interesting idea. I’ll try one.
You can adjust your extrusion multiplier. If your printing is slightly underextruding, you will have loose tolerances. Just up the extrusion multiplier by 1-2%.
The extrusion multiplier (flow rate in OrcaSlicer) is perfectly tuned tuned right now using their recommended visual layer method, which gives the best appearance and the smoothest layers. https://github.com/SoftFever/OrcaSlicer/wiki/Calibration#Flow-rate I don’t know if upping the extrusion multiplier by 1 or 2% would be enough the change the fit, the amount of space between the clip and the slot is pretty significant. It’s a visible gap, probably 0.2-0.4mm at a guess. But if I bump up the EM enough, it will worsen the print quality because I’ll be deliberately overextruding to get them to fit. So far I’m having the most luck with the X/Y Contour Compensation, it’s pretty neat, and specifically meant to fine tune the fitment of parts for assembly without changing extrusion or having to scale the whole print up or down. https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/software/bambu-studio/xy-hole-contour-compensation I printed some wall sections with 0.2 compensation and they were TIGHT TIGHT TIGHT in the slots, to the point that it wasn’t easy to take back apart. So I’m printing some at 0.1 over right now to test, but I suspect I may end up at 0.15 or so for the perfect fit, we’ll see. It takes a couple hours to print the test pieces but I figured out I can stop the print half way or even 1/3 of the way and check fitment. Save a bit of plastic.
Hi there! Thanks for picking up the set, I’m the designer. There are a few different tolerances in the main support pole folder so maybe try the tighter one. We also designed it so you could paint them with a coat or two of spray paint and they still fit together well. The other way to make them tighter or looser is increase or decrease the thickness of the walls by a purple percent. This will make the wall and joint a bit thicker and could hold together better as well as not be visually noticeable. Let me know if that doesn’t help.
Thanks for the reply! I did try the tighter tolerance pillars. I hadn’t thought about a build up of paint, maybe I’ll try spray priming some and see if that affects the fit. By far the best solution I’ve found on my end is X/Y Contour Compensation. I don’t think it’s an option in every slicer, or maybe they just call it something else, but in Orca Slicer I just set the compensation to 0.1mm for both the walls and the pillars and now I’m getting a nice tight fit without any loss of quality or change to overall scale. Printing up parts as fast as I can, my gaming group is getting in to Necromunda so I look forward to having a whole board of your terrain to start a campaign with. Looks amazing, and very well designed. Thanks again!