How to Setup a Temperature Tower with PrusaSlicer

In this tutorial, we’ll guide you through creating a temperature tower using PrusaSlicer, which is the first step to calibrate your printer to get better prints.

When it comes to hobby-grade FDM 3D printing, getting perfect prints is not easy without calibrating your settings to each of your filaments. The most important setting is the temperature used at the printer’s nozzle. If you print too hot, your overhangs and bridges will suffer and you’ll get abnormal stringing; if you print too cold, you’ll experience more clogs, under-extrusion and poor layer adhesion, which will make you end-up with weak parts. For those reasons it’s very important to find the best temperature to print and do so with each filament brand and color.

Printing a temperature tower is an easy, fast and economic way of finding the right temperature to use with your printer. You’ll only be spending 6 grams of filament and less than an hour to get the right settings to print your models, instead of running the risk of having a failed, bad-looking, weak print or even worse: a clog in your hotend. These problems would make you waste time and filament reprinting the part and trying out different temperatures. By printing a temperature tower, you can test a wide-range of temperatures for your filaments in a single, fast print.

Steps

• Download a model for the temperature tower. The model used in this tutorial is available here.
• Open PrusaSlicer and import the .stl file of the model you’ve downloaded.

• Choose the material profile of the filament you’re gonna calibrate. In our case, we’re using the generic ABS profile.
• Add a brim to increase the contact surface of the first layer.

• Go to Filament Settings > Temperature and change the nozzle temperature to the highest value you’re gonna test. In our case, it’s 260 ºC.

• Click Slice now. PrusaSlicer will then show you a preview of the printed part. In this preview you can inspect the layers of your print by using the slider bar on the right side.

• Now we have to add the commands to change the temperature in each section of the temperature tower. We can do that by sliding the preview to the layer corresponding to the start of a section and right clicking the + icon in the slider. It will show you an option to add custom G-code.
• Click Add custom G-code and insert the command M104 SXXX, where XXX corresponds to the temperature of the nozzle in ºC. To learn about G-code commands you can check our previous post here.

• You’ll have to repeat the last step for each section, always decreasing the temperature, according to the values in your tower. In our case there are 9 sections, from 260 ºC to 220 ºC, in 5 ºC decrements.
• After adding the commands for each section, click Slice now.
• On the lower left corner, in View, you can choose the option Temperature and check the temperature values for each section of your tower.

• Finally, click Export G-code to save your .gcode file that’s ready to be printed!

Results

Once you have printed your temperature tower, it’s time to analyze your results. Check the quality of the overhangs, bridges, text and corners, and compare each section to find the best looking ones. After that you can also do a destructive test by trying to break the print between the layers, so you can test layer adhesion.

So, have you already printed a temperature tower but are unsure about which temperature you should use for your prints? Show it to us in the comments and we’ll help you choose the right temperature so you can have better looking and stronger prints!