Before I got my first 3D printer I wondered why everyone printed this little cute looking boat called Benchy.
And guess what I’ve printed first after I’ve assembled my Prusa i3 MK3S+ ?
Of course, a Benchy 🙂
History of the Benchy
The Benchy is around since 2015 and is a used as a benchmark for 3D printers.
With this tiny little boat you can assess the quality of your printer / filament / calibration.
This model contains a lot of different challenges for 3d printers like tiny holes, slopes, large overhangs, cylindrical shapes which reveal issues with the calibration or build quality of the printer.
The first attempt
The first Benchy I’ve printed, was quite ok in overall print quality, but the bottom side revealed some issue with the nozzle distance to the heatbed.
When the nozzle is to far away fro the heatbed, the first layer isn’t smooth. So this needs some calibration.
The second attempt
A tip came from Jens Dittmar: Set the Mesh bed leveling to 7×7.
The Mesh bed leveling settings can be found under Settings – Mesh bed Leveling
When you change the setting from 3×3 to 7×7 the printer will use 49 test points instead of 9.
After that I did another Z-Axis calibration and adjusted the nozzle closer to the heatdbed.
This was the result:
This came out actually quite nice. To further optimize the prints I got the recommendation to print a temp tower to align the print temperature to the used filament.
