Getting Started Tuning Your 3D Printer: The Order That Actually Works

Getting Started Tuning Your 3D Printer: The Order That Actually Works

Every 3D printer tuning guide on the internet starts with a different setting. Klipper's docs start one place, Ellis' guide starts another, and a random forum reply starts wherever it wants. That's the actual problem — not the settings themselves, but the order. Each tuning step changes how the next one behaves, so doing them out of order means retuning everything twice and trusting nothing.

Here is the order we use on our own machines, and the one we recommend to customers. It isn't our invention: it's the order that Klipper, Marlin, and Duet's own documentation agree on, cross-checked against Ellis' Print Tuning Guide and Teaching Tech.

The recommended tuning order: mechanical prep, Z offset and first layer, temperature, input shaping with PA disabled, then pressure advance and flow, then retraction last

Why order matters more than values

Two facts break every badly-ordered tuning session:

  • Input shaping changes real acceleration. A shaper superimposes extra motion impulses; pressure advance is acceleration-dependent. Tune PA before shaping and the shaper invalidates your PA number. All three firmware docs say this explicitly — Klipper's PA notes, Marlin's Input Shaping page ("Frequency Sweep patterns are printed with Linear Advance disabled"), and Duet's ("first tune Input Shaping, then Pressure Advance, then Retraction").
  • Retraction and pressure advance overlap. PA already pulls filament back at the end of moves, so retraction tuned before PA ends up too high. Marlin's docs say it plainly: after Linear Advance is dialed in, "retraction may even be as low as 0."

Same logic one level down: PA only redistributes material in time, it never changes the total — so the extrusion multiplier / flow setting belongs after PA, not before (the same ordering shows up in the PA/EM-interaction literature, worth reading when something looks wrong after both).

The seven steps

1. Mechanical checks — the boring 30 minutes that save 30 days

Frame bolts tight, belts tensioned (about 110 Hz plucked over a 150 mm span is a common starting target — belt width and metal vs plastic brackets shift the absolute number, so match X and Y to each other first; symmetry matters more than the exact Hz), rails/rods clean, no wobble in the toolhead, nozzle seated properly after a hot re-torque. Klipper's calibration docs start with "be sure to run the checks described in the config check document" before any tuning tool — same for us. A loose gantry makes every subsequent number wrong in a confident, consistent way, which is worse than obviously wrong.

2. Z offset and first layer

Paper test at room temperature (thermal expansion of the nozzle ≈ cancels), then probe offset if you have one: Klipper PROBE_CALIBRATE/Z_ENDSTOP_CALIBRATE, Marlin M851, Duet G30 S-1 + G31. Every tuning step after this assumes the first layer is what you think it is.

3. Extruder calibration (E-steps / rotation_distance)

Mark 100 mm, extrude 100 mm, measure, adjust — Klipper uses rotation_distance (not steps/mm), Marlin M92 E + M500, Duet M92 E + config.g. If 100 doesn't equal 100, every PA and flow number you chase afterwards is fiction.

4. Temperature (and PID) before flow

Temperature sets viscosity, viscosity sets back-pressure, back-pressure sets what pressure advance needs to compensate. Dial temperature in for surface quality and bridges first — temp towers are their own guide — then PID so the heater isn't the reason your next test print failed: PID_CALIBRATE (Klipper, then SAVE_CONFIG), M303 + M500 (Marlin), M303/M307 + M500 (Duet).

5. Input shaping with pressure advance turned OFF

Klipper: ADXL345/LSM303 accelerometer SHAPER_CALIBRATE, or the ringing tower with the tuning-tower accel sweep. Marlin 2.1.2+: the frequency-sweep patterns from the official Input Shaping Calibration Tool → M593 X F<Hz>, or M493/FT_MOTION shapers on 2.1.3+. Duet: accelerometer + DWC input-shaping plugin or the ringing tower → M593.

Then turn PA back on and re-run your shaping test one more time — Klipper's PA docs specifically say to repeat the resonance check with PA active, because PA changes extruder-driven vibration too.

6. Pressure advance, then flow

This is the fun one, and it has its own full guide: Pressure Advance, Finally Explained — including our free three-firmware G-code generator. Short version: print the pattern at your real accelerations, read the corners, save the value. Then do extrusion multiplier / flow-ratio cubes if surfaces still read fat or thin — and if corners gap no matter what PA you pick, check your hotend's flow ceiling first (our flow-rate calculator turns one test print into the limits your slicer needs).

7. Retraction last, then speeds

Drop retraction distance down from where it was — often dramatically — because PA already handles line-end pressure. Then, and only then, start raising speeds and accelerations, re-testing corners after each jump. When something looks ugly along the way, the artifact gallery is here: Print Troubleshooting: Identify Any 3D Print Defect.

The disagreements, handled

Three real ones you'll run into:

  • Teaching Tech does retraction before e-steps in their calibration sequence. That ordering matches their workflow-first site structure, but retraction depends on PA behavior, which depends on e-steps — we keep it last and so do all three firmware docs.
  • The corner-pattern school puts input shaping in the "advanced" section after PA — yet that school's own saving-your-value page says retune PA after shaping. The reconciliation is in step 5 above: shape first if you have the tooling, and always re-check PA after any shaper change.
  • Klipper's official PA test runs crippled accelerations (ACCEL=500, SCV=1) while the corner-pattern camp argues — and we agree — that normal-printing accelerations give the truer number. Both methods live in the PA guide.

When to retune what

Change this… Retune this…
New filament brand or colour Pressure advance (pigments change flow)
Nozzle diameter change Pressure advance, flow
Temp change > ~10 °C Pressure advance
Input shaper on/off or retune Pressure advance
Hotend / extruder / bowden length change Everything from step 3 down
Belt tension, new toolhead, heavier bed Input shaping, then PA
Bigger nozzle or higher-flow hotend (e.g. Takoto / chambered nozzles) Max flow limits (re-run the flow calculator), then PA + EM

What we keep within arm's reach

Affiliate disclosure: some links below are affiliate links — if you buy through them we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you, which keeps the free generators free. We only list what we actually use.

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