Accidentally printed a chocolate mold instead of the object itself

Question

This is my first time printing 3D of any kind.

I'm not 100% sure what happened. The quality of some of these first printouts has ranged between 'not great' and 'unrecognizabe glop'.

I'm testing with a Wiiboox Sweetin.

So far the quality of the printed items, using the demo designs and the company-included sample dark an white chocolate is a little underwhelming: The details are crude (rough edges / lack of detail) and the speed is slow (about 20 minutes to print something the size of your thumb).

Also tried to print a word created Blender (MacOS), exported to STL, imported to Ultimaker Cura where it was sized and positioned, sliced and exported to a .gcode file. That printout seemed to be a mold of the object as opposed to the object itself.

Attached are two images, the 1st shows what was intended to print. The 2nd shows what actually printed.

If you can see past the globs and blobs, and look closely, you might be able to make out why it looks to me like a mold instead of the intended item.

Side note I noticed that when the printer stopped printing (to move w/o printing), the extruder screw pulled back 10 - 20 mm, which seems excessive.

So some first timer questions:

• What 3D printing controls might affect rough edges?

• What 3D printing controls would have an impact on a speed of completion. I know there's arm speed, but perhaps detail, maybe something else?

• Is there some control -- something along the lines of 'invert' -- that would explain why I seemed to have gotten a cast instead of the printed object?

• Is there a setting that controls how far back the extruder arm retracts when it moves?

• Is it necessary to install a printer to compatible with Wiibox Sweetin in Cura? Wiiboox isn't an option, but perhaps there's something compatible. The printer comes with a CuraWindows.exe app (I'm on MacOS using Ultimaker Cura v4.8.0); there are two .ini files that come with that: 60ml0.6.ini & 60ml0.84.ini.

Thanks for any and all advice.

Answer 1

Cura contains a few different so-called "special modes" which changes what the software does with your STL. One such special mode is Mold mode which, instead of recreating the object, creates a mold for the STL. It appears you may have that setting turned on, so disabling it will cause Cura to work as intended.

To answer your other questions:

• Most settings affect "rough shape", properly slicing your STLs to fit your printer and printing material is an essential skill to master in 3D printing. So there is no magic setting to get it all working, you need to tune all your settings according to what you want to print.

• Your speed sounds fine, I can't speak for this printer in particular but print jobs taking hours or even days is not out of the ordinary. 3D prints in general take quite some time to complete.

• Yes, usually it's called Retraction Length.

• Yes it is definitely necessary to set up Cura to your printer settings because Cura needs to know the build volume of your printer and what flavor of firmware is installed on it.