GregValiant

Your print speeds are very conservative. You know your printer though. The print time the way I set up the print is 7:30 as opposed to 18:15. GV_TwistedCup(Final).3mf

I like Adaptive Layers when there are shallow angles on a part. The lower layer heights make for smaller steps between them. The roof of the Benchy would be an example. On that model I think the variations in layer height will be noticeable as they give a "striped" effect. This is from Cura in Orthographic view. You can see it kind of has a tiger stripe thing going on. Just checking here - you HAVE calibrated your E-Steps and you DID NOT use a single/double wall contraption to mess it up? Good. It looks like you level manually. If you are running Windows I have a little app I wrote for leveling, tuning a print, and controlling SD printing from your computer. There is even a side app for calibrating E-steps and a textbox that collects the printer responses to commands like M503. I tried to eliminate having to mess with the knob on the LCD. I can pass that along.

For some of the journey you'll be skipping down the yellow brick road. Other parts you'll be stumbling blindly through the deep dark woods. My printer has been running really well and today it decided it wanted to melt it's way down through the print. Big time crash there. It was within a few strokes of finishing the top layer too. SD card was bad I suppose. so I formatted it again. It seems to be OK now. Ya just never know.

I'll bite. Anything in particular I should be looking for? I won't be printing this but it was handy. I have a bit of PETG to get rid of. Something narrow and long would be a good test. The settings were 12mm support brim, 3mm regular brim, the big circle is 25mm diameter.

Those look good. Are they going to get any post processing (Acetone vapes, sand and paint, etc.)? I'm going to pass this along because it worked for me. The parts were tall and narrow and would be in the sun and I wanted to print fast and that meant PLA. They have held up surprisingly well shape-wise. They are starting to suffer some color fading. What we have here are shark fins for the roof of our SUV. American flag colors on this "Banner" set (I also have Italian flags and actual black shark fins in PETG). In the yellow circle are 2mm holes. They get short pieces of filament stuck in them as locating pins for the glue joint. The yellow arrow is pointing to a 5.4mm hole that gets a 3/16" x 9" steel rod stuck in it during a pause. The nuts go in during a pause as well. I think the striped American flag model had 9 pauses and they were close together. It was a PITA 7 hour print (times 2 of course). Anyway, there is no longer a problem finding our car in a parking lot. (I could say the same for the bike if it had a Rabid Transit fairing instead of the National Flyscreen.)

I responded to one of them. I think it was the old thread you brought back to life. Cool. Not just Time Travel and Anti-Gravity but Resurrection too! 👼

To paraphrase Yogi Berra "These posts are like Deja Vu all over again." Wait a minute...didn't I see that somewhere? I see that anti-gravity is involved somehow but this is more like time travel.

To paraphrase Yogi Berra "These posts are like Deja Vu all over again."

I set the profile to "Standard Quality 0.2mm" and it sliced as a tube (with the cap to the side). The model had some errors and I repaired it in MS 3D Builder and slicing the repaired model it looked the same to me. Did you uncheck "Remove all Holes" in Mesh Fixes and "Make Overhang Printable" in Experimental? Here's a project file with the repaired model and using that "Standard Quality" profile. GV_TwistedCup(Final).3mf

That's the best bet for now. If the Qidi fork of Cura has your printer definition in it then it would be a good place to start. Their version is likely a few releases out of date but when you are starting out - simpler is better. If you were printing well with the Makerbot software then putting a Cura definition together wouldn't be very difficult. That would be doubly true if Qidi Print has a definition file for your printer.

Alright, I'll buy that. I'm not going to retract my statement though. Besides, isn't he the guy that hated single layer prints so much he wouldn't let them slice?

That bottom 1/3 or so is printing pretty well. You could try moving the part down in the Cura build plate so that lower 1/3 doesn't print. It would give you a quicker test setup and save some material.

"Slowing it down is against my personal nature,..." Yes. But we all learn to walk before we can run. Don't throw out slowing down yet. You might try checking the layer time of the last few "good" layers and set your minimum layer time at something near those times. It's true that the following layers print speed would be slower but the layer times would not. You could tell people you didn't do it...Cura did. The E acceleration isn't a Cura setting but you can adjust Maximum E Accel in the printer either from the LCD or with M201 E1234 in your startup gcode. That would only help if it is the limiting factor in an extrusion move and the current M201 setting is 200 or some other low number. I don't want to get fixated on the temperature management thing, but I have this feeling that it's part of it.

Before I forget again, have you played with the extruder Acceleration setting? I know you've adjusted the pressure advance, I was just wondering about the Accel, retraction/prime speed...that sort of thing. In this image it looks pretty darn good below my yellow line. Then at the lower cyan arcs it starts to go bad. Inside my green circles it looks terrible. The top cyan area is the one I thought most looks to be heat related. Your "similar areas different results" comment is a good one. I don't know the toolpath and just thinking out loud - could those bad areas have been extruded close together and the good areas the nozzle took more time to get back to? Another thought...Have you tried dropping the print speed as it gets taller? The part does get smaller as it builds and the nozzle is coming around to the same spot quicker. It sucks having to watch it through a little hole. Stick a camera in there and pipe it to your TV.

Circular would have been better. I went with "Easy". I did end up printing several of these. They came out fine. The parts are in the Florida sun and so PETG was a much better choice.

Let me start with the fact that I have nothing to do with Cura or Ultimaker. I'm a retired fireman from Detroit who has done some work with gcode and has dabbled in serial communication and scribbled some software as a hobby. "I can not be the only one with this issue" You aren't. All Creality Ender 3 users have the same issue. "I buy a 3D printer with a 235x235 bed and can not use the all of the bed. That i only can use 207x207" The disallowed areas should only be on the top and bottom and affect the Y. You should have 235 in the X. The Cura definition puts the "Printable Area" at 220 x 220. The disallowed areas are a separate deal. Why they added them to the 3 and not the 3 Pro only Creality knows. So with a 220 x 220 printable area on a 235 x 235 build plate we see that Creality has built in a 7.5mm safety border all the way around. You can cut that down with no problems. "I do not believe this is this Creality intended purpose to miss lead me in thinking im getting a 235x235 and only letting me use 207x207" Now you're making me laugh. Creality says many misleading things. I've had my Ender 3 Pro for 2 1/2 years and I've gone round and round with "warranty" people at Creality a couple of times. I ordered a silent mainboard and when it arrived the E stepper driver didn't work. It took 3 months for them to finally acknowledge that it was their problem and to send a new one. The four fans? Junk. Nothing to do but replace them with decent ones. The plastic extruder arms ALL break. They have been known to be delivered broken. I bought the cheapest printer out there and I knew it would be crappy. It came around though and works very well...now. I totally understand why it was priced so low. "Also CURA has ability to adjust ANY setting in any of the 3D printers that they support. But just not this one?? unlikely." I tried to explain...it is not a "Cura setting". It is a "Creality definition". This is from the Creality base definition file that all of their printers use: { "name": "Creawsome Base Printer", "version": 2, "inherits": "fdmprinter", "metadata": { "visible": false, "author": "trouch.com", "manufacturer": "Creality3D", Why would Ultimaker care how Creality handles their printer definitions? Why would they care how TronXY or Artillery or BiBo or anyone else handles their printer definitions. It's not like Ultimaker can or would go out and buy one of every printer in the world and make sure they work right with Cura. Printer definition files are text files. You can open them in Notepad and make adjustments. That means anyone can make changes to their definition file. It's what I did and you can too. As I've said a couple of times - the disallowed areas are part of the "definition" and not a "setting". You will get more support for your printer over on the Reddit Ender 3 Group. I think what you will find is that when this comes up people just use the Ender 3 Pro definition because it doesn't have the disallowed areas and is otherwise identical to the regular Ender 3 definition.

This is the method I came up with. You can see that the mouse ears are part of the model and have chamfers at the trim lines. It works and that's always the bottom line. I print this model in PETG with a skirt (a brim didn't add anything) as the part was narrow enough that all the pull was from the ends. The print works hard to pull those tabs up.

In that 2nd photo I think it shows you don't have the heat under control yet. It isn't cooling fast enough and the result is all that sloppiness. The top of the rectangular center support is a dead giveaway. So better control of the heat as the part builds would be something to investigate. Can you print two parts at once? That might help as the travel time between the parts would add to the layer time and allow more cooling before the nozzle returns with another blast of hot plastic. When I print tall skinny parts and there is a lot of movement in the Y, and since my Ender is a bed slinger, I will add acceleration reduction commands to the gcode at say layer 600 and lessen it more at layer 1000. It makes a big difference in print quality to keep the herki-jerkiness out of the mechanicals. Maybe your thought on the abrupt changes in direction (which would be "Jerk" I think) is on the mark. If you scale the part down in Cura just in the XY you might save some material while keeping the problems in sight. A plus is that I don't think I'm seeing the under-extrusion in the walls that was apparent in the early attempts. You are keeping a spreadsheet and documenting all the changes for each print. That's a statement and not a question. A good analysis requires keeping good records of the data. Cura has a plugin in the Marketplace for exporting all the settings. That would be useful. Saving a project file of each batch of changes would be good too.

There it is from two of the guys that really know. There are two new settings that have an effect on this. They are in the Walls section "Split Middle Line Threshold" and "Add Middle Line Threshold". I have not played with them much, but they tend to limit the extrusion width allowing for a higher counts in narrow places. They are percentages rather than some hard coded absolute. To paraphrase from the popup help balloon - Increase the number to use fewer and wider lines and decrease to use more and thinner lines. So it would appear that there is some adjustability in the max line width.

That might force me to learn to work with Python. I'm still struggling with Fortran IV. The worldwide shortage of punch cards isn't helping.

OK, I'll concede the point on Rafts. I've never found a need to use one and that probably colors my opinion. Mouse ears on the other hand...I use those a lot on PETG prints. My preference is to design them into the part as I can add chamfers where the ear attaches to the part so they break off easier. For quick fixes the "Tab Anti-Warping" gizmos work fine using "Print as Part" and no walls.

The "SmartAvionics" guy is @burtoogle here. You can maybe reach him through his https://github.com/smartavionics site. He maintains his "Master" branch of Cura there.

"...because they prefer people to use a Raft..." I don't see that at all. Why would anyone care what anyone else uses? Rafts are old tech that the new printers don't require, they use a lot of plastic, are hard to remove and require post-processing of the part to get rid of the scars. A skirt does nothing for build plate adhesion, it just gets the juices flowing. If you really want to hold it down to prevent warping or some such then throw some mouse ears around.

How are you powering the bed and hot end? Are they separate from the mainboard (other than control wiring)? Going back through all your photos, I think I'm seeing a persistent problem with extrusion. Even the Benchies have what appears to be some over-extrusion on the decks (I think skins give a better indication of over-under extrusion than walls). Have you tried slicing in 4.13.1? Yes, there are new settings in 5.0 but I'm not 100% sure they are dialed in within Cura. Even if they are it will take some getting used to them to become proficient slicing with 5.0. Since you are kind of "mission critical" here, maybe going back to 4.13.1 would yield better results for now. 5.0 can cause more travel moves which translates to more oozing between extrusions which in turn can cause the nozzle to start out dry leaving artifacts at the start of extrusions. Another reason would be the way 5.0 splits walls. I have a feeling that some of what you saw in the preview as "rib remnants" may be because settings like "Split Middle Line Threshold" and "Add Middle Line Threshold" and "Maximum Extrusion Area Deviation" just aren't well understood yet.

Hi. My printer is also an Ender 3 Pro. There are really just three possibilities here. The first one goes with my Rule #11 "Always go back to the last thing you did." and in this case it's the extruder arm. You didn't mention whether it was the stock plastic arm or if you had an aluminum arm. The stock plastic arms ALL break. There have been instances where they were broken when first taken out of the box. So take it off and look at the underside around the pivot hole (it should be a brass insert). Get it under a good light and look for cracks around the insert. A magnifying glass would be helpful. The second thing is a partial clog at the bottom of the bowden tube where it is supposed to seal against the back end of the nozzle. You need to warm up the hot end and pull the filament out, then pull the cover off the hot end and remove the nozzle. From the top, take out the bowden tube. Sometimes they are stuck in there pretty good and it's easier to pull the other end out of the extruder fitting and slide the hot end fitting off that way. A properly sized piece of wire (maybe a straightened out coathanger) can be shoved down all the way through the hot end. If it pushes out a plug of plastic you have your culprit. In a pinch you can use a 300mm long piece of filament (but ya gotta go fast because the hot end will start melting it immediately). I'm sure CHEP has a YouTube video on the proper way to trim the bowden tube and re-assemble everything. Trimming it with a single edged razor is the best way. The cut must be as close to 90° as you can get it. If you haven't done so - buy some Capricorn tubing to replace the stock bowden tube. It doesn't break down as fast. Remember that the bowden tube is a consumable and they don't last forever. The third thing is really a pain in the wallet. If the E-stepper chip on the mainboard died then it just isn't pushing as much plastic as the gcode is asking for. If you re-calibrate your E-steps and they turn out around 250 or 300 then the chip has fried. Your E-steps should be somewhere in the range of 90 to 110 (mine are at 100). This is not repairable and you would need to replace the mainboard. So there you are. Don't feel bad or overwhelmed. My printer went through all three of those. @gr5 used the term "Under-Extrusion" correctly but "Erraticallyk"...I don't know. I thought it had a couple more rrrr's in it.