Extruder Setup & Calibration

Calibrating your Extruder and Tension Settings
Extruder Setup & Calibration - Revision 2 - 21/09/20 - Chris White

[Document in Draft Edit]

Extruder Tension Settings
Tension settings at your Extruder Tension Screw should be adjusted according to your filament. Each extruder will be slightly different and based on user results.

Adjust your screw in completely by hand until you are unable to turn it. Then complete one full turn with the Allen Key. Then, based on this, continue to adjust it as necessary during printing.

You do not want big grooves to be left in the filament, and you do not want the tension so light that it just grinds and shaves the filament instead of gripping and pushing it.

The Diagram below shows the operation of the Tension Screw

Extruder Calibration
The Rotrics Extruder Motor operates by turning a cog wheel which, when placed under tension as per the details above, allows us to push and pull filament in our 3D printing operation. The rotation of that cog wheel is adjusted by means of a ratio.

This is known in G-Code as the Extruder "Steps per MM" or "steps/mm" value. Simply put - the amount that the motor needs to turn to push/pull 1mm of filament.

Extruder Calibration is the process of tuning that steps/mm figure to ensure that when the G-Code in your print asks for 100mm of filament to be delivered, you get 100mm.

However, due to many variables including filament type, printing conditions and motor wear, the Extruder may not always deliver the amount of filament we are asking for. This can lead to under and over extrusion issues as well as problems with retraction and many more.

This is a guide to tuning your Extruder to get the best 3D printing performance.

Lets get started!


 * 1.1 - Using a bright coloured filament (White, Orange, Red, Yellow) - make a pen mark on your filament - 120mm away from the Extruder as shown in the diagram. When we test our Extruder, we will expect 100mm of filament to be consumed. So 20mm of filament should remain between the extruder and the pen mark you just made.


 * 1.2 - Next, we need to create the Extruder Test File, courtesy of our Discord Member, Reknox (Thanks!) . Due to restrictions on Fandom, we can't share the ready-made g-code file (Sorry! Fandom Rules!) so you will need to make it yourself.