4N6

Dear GregVailant, thanks for the time spent in your investigation and tests. I will of course double check my printer Z system. On my side I also made some tests on what might be "a Cura gcode reader video glitch" according to your first reply. I installed Cura on a brand new laptop (Windows 10) and, as you were not able to see the wider layer on screen, I also installed different printer's models including the same as yours, a Ender 3 Pro. I then sliced the test cube with each printer profile, saved the g-code and re-importing them in Cura. Results: The expanded second layer appears only with the Creality profiles (Ender 3 pro & 5 plus) !!! All the other printer profiles I installed (Prusa i3, Ultimaker S3 and Custom FFF) do not show the wider layer. For those models, the displayed reloaded layers perfectly match what was shown on the preview screen before saving to file. I am now convinced that the glitch is a Creality printer profile issue.

Yes it shows up on the print. In the begining, I believed it was an elephant's foot issue but looking more closely I noticed it was not the first but the second layer that was impacted. Slicing with Prusa (or Slic3r) does not give the problem (and worse, reloading their generated gcode in Cura shows a perfect second layers) This said, I checked with Notepad my gcode and you are right: all external perimeters are perfectly aligned, the cause is not an expanded second layer. In fact, when I move the sliding cursor down to show the 3 first layers only... Doing so, I can clearly see that it's the width of the second line that seems the real issue, not its xy coordinates ! It looks like there is too much extrusion. I will investigate in that direction. When I switch on the "relative extrusion" and I reload the generated gcode, Cura does not display the line width anymore (strange but coherent with an extrusion issue), they are all thin blue lines. I will test a real print in relative extrusion to see if this might solve the problem.

Thanks Greg Here is the Small Cube saved project. I also uploaded the stl basic shape in case of. SmallCube.3mf SmallCube.stl

Second layer expanded I am facing a weird issue with Cura 4.13.0 (and previous versions as well) for all objects I want to slice. The second layer (not the first) is slightly expanded compared to all the other ones. To illustrate, let’s assume I want to print a basic small cube. I load the cube (STL file), slice it with default installation settings and the preview shows that all the layers are perfectly vertically aligned. I then save the G-code to disk, clean the build plate and just re-open the generated G-code file. As you can see, all the layers including the first one are all well aligned except the second layer which is wider. Of course this second layer expansion is visible on the printed object. Any idea why this occurs?