Dual extruder question

[billyd]

I have a Taz 5 that I just installed the dual extruder for.

Part of the process is calibrating the extruder to let a slicer know what the distance between the nozzles are in X and Y. After calibration, my numbers are -.06 for x and -51.79 for Y. I entered this data into Slic3r and the calibration box printed out perfectly.

I setup a two color model in S3D which consisted of two STL's each with a different process and different extruder. In the second process (for the second extruder) I entered an offset in the Gcode tab of -06 x and 51.79 for y (S3D reverses the Y axis in comparison to Slic3r). When printing, I noticed a gap in Y that was bigger than any error you might expect, but small enough to know the offsets I entered were the correct sign. They were "in the neighborhood" of being correct, but were wrong.

Long story short, I ended up having to enter -.3 for x and 53.8 for y. a full 2mm difference!

With calipers my nozzles are 51.8 mm apart in Y (center to center of nozzles)

I double checked my stl's and they are lined up perfectly in S3D. I've attached the factory file and gcode (zip file) for reference.

So what am I doing wrong? Or is there a bug in S3d?

[habloIngles]

In your starting script try putting at the very beginning:

M218 X0 Y0 T0
M218 X-.06 Y51.8 T1

make sure you remove all g-code offsets in both processes and see if that works better for you. What that command does is tells your printer the offset of the second extruder in relation to the first one. This way you'll see the models in the previewer line up just as they should, and hopefully do the same with your print if your offsets are correct.