Printing with wrong nozzle size!

[dkightley]

Now here's something I did accidentally yesterday.

I needed to do a quick modification to one of the houses for the model railway layout I'm building......so I modded the design in my CAD package and exported it as an .stl file. I opened S3D and loaded a factory file for a similar house and then replaced the model with the newly modified model, generated the gcode to SD card. I then loaded the SD card into one of my printers....and it printed.

At this point, I realised that I'd used a profile designed for a 0.4 mm nozzle.....and I'd printed the model on my printer that had a 0.2 mm nozzle. "Whoops." I thought....and removed the model, expecting to have to chuck it and re-print on the other printer. But, wait a minute......a perfect print! Apart from a whisker or two around the roof and one of the three chimney pots, that is...which I expect anyway!

Now we're talking about a small print here (22 mm x 14 mm x 21 mm)...but am I just plain lucky this model printed, or are settings not that important after all??

[Heutinck]

That is interesting. It may be able to print, but are the dimensions accurate or is the model half the size? I could see if the extrusion width was set to a larger value than the nozzle width to compensate for the reduced nozzle, but you said it printed perfectly. that's really odd.

[zemlin]

The printer is going to extrude the correct amount of plastic - since it thought the nozzle was smaller the plastic probably just got pulled into a thinner stream as the head was moving. Hadn't really thought about this before, but it does seem reasonable that it would still come out OK - I might expect some softer corners or slightly wavy perimeter layers running a nozzle 2x what it was supposed to be.