mcmuffin6o

Check out this neat filament:

See if this video helps you:

Update: I'm just an idiot. The entirety of the temperature range printed fine. Pictures tonight

I think the next move is to print a temperature tower. Perhaps multiple, at differing speeds. Now that I have a presumably high quality hotend, I can err on the side of blaming myself. Either way, I can at least lay down plastic now, which is a huge relief after all of the time and money I've spent.

Yep, but at least that time the printer was able to print. When I have the crazy underextrusion issue, the printer won't even lay down the first layer. I had both my esteps and flow too low for that print, but now I've recalibrated both for the new hotend and the prints come out nice and opaque.

The new Spider hotend comes with one, and I have it installed. Nope. Yep, I know. I printed at an appropriately lower layer height (and width, of course) for the smaller nozzle, and I'm pretty sure I had tried slowing the speed as well. There were times where I could push filament through with my hand easily enough, but when it started clogging/jamming it was impossible to do so.

> quality of the components Crazily enough, the new thermistor that comes with the Spider hotend seems to agree with the bed! I am tempted to get an infrared thermometer, though. > If you are getting good prints at 240 then print at 240 That's the thing--you can tell that the prints have bumpy walls and uneven lines. Not to mention that the plastic ends up much shinier and is less aesthetically pleasing. > What's important are the results True, I've been learning this more and more as this goofy machine seems to defy so much general 3D printing advice online. I will have to let my mind think outside the box. > The business end of the thermistor... On the Spider hotend, the high-temperature thermistor is cartridge shaped, and secured with a set screw, just like the heating element! I broke one thermistor on an old hotend, so I sure am glad not to be dealing with a crappy glass bead anymore. I'll have to get a thermometer, it'll be one more thing to rule out... Nails will get done soon. First, some sleep 😴

I need to write this down before I forget... I might be seeing things since it's almost 5am, but the quality of prints seems to be increasing as I print. Perhaps I've burnt through the outer layer of waterlogged filament and the dryness is improving. This is just another hypothesis on top of the water absorption hypothesis, but worth writing down in the thread at least.

Okay so after trying the new Creality Spider all-metal hotend, I still had the same issue. I decided to try heating the thing to 240C for PLA since the heat creep shouldn't be much of a problem, and the issue went away! I think maybe the PLA absorbed water and required higher printing temps as a result, but I'm also very suspicious of the fact that the same exact filament would produce gorgeous prints at 195C and now requires 235+C to even get out of the nozzle. Speaking of which, here is a comparison between one of the times the printer decided to work at 195 with the stock hotend (maybe this was when I opened a new spool??? I really don't think so but I can't be sure.) vs. now having to print at 240C. Note: these were printed with IDENTICAL gcode that I only modified the temperature for. Also note: I didn't even notice the underextrusion (not part-ruining underextrusion, I think someone had convinced me to turn flow down to 95% for no good reason) on the nice cube until taking these close-ups! p.s. Sorry in advance for my absolutely fucked up nails, it's been a rough start to the semester and I haven't had the time to care for them.

Christ, okay. You really went turbo on the thing. Weird that I could never find plastic between bowden and nozzle when I took apart the hotend to look for such things. There's a lot of good advice in your post, and hopefully it will allow me to get more consistent results.

Oof, that's a lot of retraction. Is the filament dry? Is there any filament drag occurring in the hotend? Sometimes I get rid of dribbles when I turn DOWN retraction, weirdly enough... But then again as you can tell by my most recent post, nothing really makes sense for me. Maybe the speed of retraction is too fast or something... The only thing I can think to do is to play with retraction speed and distance. Start high speed low distance, optimize distance, then optimize speed. Then, try optimizing speed and then distance. Experiment!

Y'all should probably create new posts for separate problems that you are having, but to the original poster: try setting up linear advance. It's a bit of a learning curve to figure out how to build it into the firmware, but teaching tech has a really good video on it. Also, this other of his goes into better depth on how to build custom firmware. Best of luck!

Upload your gcode and 3mf files

Hello again everyone :/ Hello again @GregValiant, who has helped me many times and correctly predicted the last time I posted that it would be a while before I completed another successful print (I never even actually finished that earring). I've been struggling with underextrusion quite literally since the day I last posted in that thread. Now that I need my printer for a senior design project, however, the stakes in fixing it have been raised. I will do my best here to give as many accurate and pertinent details as I can, but please let me know if something doesn't seem right about my story or if I'm leaving anything out. So the problem started on the stock hotend that came with my ender 3 pro. For several months it had been printing flawlessly, delivering consistently beautiful prints. Then, after I tried using a smaller nozzle, it became unreasonably difficult to push filament through the hotend. I realize that a smaller nozzle will restrict the flow, but in this case if I were to extrude 7 mm or so, it would build up so much pressure that when I released the tension on the extruder arm, the filament would spring backwards a couple mm. Even after I switched back to the stock nozzle, it was still unreasonably hard to push filament through. After many nozzle swaps (that I ignorantly performed cold), my heater block was understandably leaky. I looked up how to swap nozzles because that's what seemed to cause the problem, and after learning my mistake, bought an entirely new hotend assembly, that came preinstalled with a thermistor and heater cartridge. (Note: I didn't install the aluminum extruder assembly as it was for the old style extruder). I installed it, and... the same problem cropped up after I tried printing with a smaller nozzle. It didn't matter that I cleaned it out by pushing the Bowden tube all the way through and switching back to a larger nozzle. For some reason it was once again unreasonably difficult to push filament. I tried doing the hotend fix, but that didn't fix it either. I gave up on my printer for several months, only to come back to it this winter break and find it inexplicably working. Again, though, all of the sudden it just started underextruding after I tried to use a smaller nozzle. I don't even know for sure if it has anything to do with the smaller nozzle. The filament seems easy enough to push through for a few millimeters, but it quickly starts building pressure like it never used to. I figured maybe the air gap between the heater cartridge and the hotblock might have been preventing the necessary heat flow to melt filament at typical extrusion speeds, but I filled that gap with anti-seize and it still has the exact same issue. It's worth noting that the previous hotblock-heater cartridge assembly seemed to be filled with something thermally conductive. The extruder does skip sometimes, but only at extremely high pressures and not without putting up a good fight. It's really pushing and gripping hard. I don't think it's the filament either, because I've tried different PLA filaments at different temperatures to no avail. I tried printing on the lower end, higher end, and somewhere in the middle in terms of temperature. I've ordered a bimetallic heatbreak (that's right, this time I didn't cheap out) that's set to come in on Friday, and I'm just going to carefully install it and see if that fixes my problem somehow. I know it's dumb and expensive to just swap parts and see what works, but that's where desperation has taken me. Do small nozzles permanently ruin printers? This thing is driving me nuts. What is going on here??

Nevermind, found the issue!