Dear community,
I recently got a Makerbot Replikator 2x and in most of my prints I get this strange L-formed geometry, totally separated from my actual print.
After every printed layer of the actual object, the nozzle goes and makes a layer on the L-geometry. It often doesn’t stick well to the plate and ends up ruining my print. Also it is a major material loss…
Do you have any ideas?
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That is a purge wall and you should be able to adjust its parameters as well as shut it off in settings.
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If you go into the advanced settings, you can turn this off. It’s called a “Purge Wall”. It is somewhat useful when printing with 2 colors, but still a big waste of material. What I do when I print with 2 colors is that I add tall helper disks at opposing corners of the print job. I end up with small cylinders that do get the extruder going after changing colors, but waste a minimum of material. If you have a very well level plate, you can also do away with the raft I think I also see in the picture.
You could tweak a lot of the settings manually in the advanced mode or by manually modifying the config scripts. Go to the following Makerbot page for more details on those:
https://support.makerbot.com/learn/makerbot-desktop-software/print-settings/custom-profiles-purge-wall\_12132
Happy printing!
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Hi! What you are talking about is called a walls: you can set it off in your settings (look throught the differents tabs). It is usefull when you dual print, to be sure the filament will not stick in the nozzle exit. It’s also supposed to keep the parts environment more warm, helping it having less stress and warp.
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This is a normal pattern for a dual print: one of the “newer” items I’ve noticed is the nozzles are not equally aligned ( from Makerbot) it only takes .001" difference to get this/that nozzle to rub across the part, making noise, SO:
1)when running a dual print, this fence will always be there as a temp control/ yadda yadda in 2 colors
2) double check your print settings for left/ right ( single) color and use the preview print before final export of code.
3) sometimes rotating the part for opposite nozzle clearance is neccesary, and or reset settings for lower nozzle to do the work.
Johnny
PS Thanks gang for the purge wall inputs! I thought that was a different function! 
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Cool - yeah its the purge wall. You can switch it off in the custom profile settings of the MakerBot desktop app. (in “MakerBot Print” the feature is not supported.) I have no idea why they have two different programs for the same thing.
Yeah - thanks gang for your answers. Now I have to find out how to make the wall stick and not jump around everywhere. 
happy making
I build my initial project with TurboCAD Mac, and the Powerpack package from Shark has 3DPrint structures options, upon export to stl, I then use makerware 2.1, and Sailfish (not recently though)
I have also found via the Powerpack that even though some projects are printable, they are segmented into many parts even though manifold.
Johnny
