Printer not printing Cura slicer file properly

[Snoopster 0]

Can anyone help?

Have a design to printout that has a graduated angular scale.

The design was created in Tinkercad and sent to Ultimaker Cura and printed by Creality Ender 3 V2 PRO.

Problem is the graduations on the scale are being joined together by the printer to create a 'wavy line' of graduations, whereas the design has discrete graduation lines that are not joined together.

Is there some setting in Ultimaker Cura one can use to get the printer to behave itself? I think this is somehow related to the positioning of the white start points shown in the Cura file. If the next start point is close to the preceding finish point the printer just joins them together.

[Slashee_the_Cow 417]

I actually don't think it's the printer, it's how Cura is slicing it - those distances probably aren't considered far enough to be worth retracting the filament for, meaning even if it isn't extruding during a travel, it'll probably lay down a string (if you could upload the gcode file produced, it would be possible to verify this, if you could upload the Cura project entirely - get it ready to print in Cura then go to File > Save Project and upload the .3mf here - that always gives us the best chance possible of figuring it out.

 

You also don't say what printer you're using - if you have a Bowden extruder this might be a hopeless cause, but that doesn't mean we can't try. If you have a direct drive extruder, your results are likely to be better.

 

(You might have to make all settings visible for this, I don't know how many will show up by default).

Go to Travel > Enable Retraction and make sure it's on.

Make sure Retraction Distance and Retraction Speed are set to the appropriate values (depends on your printer and material).

Set Retraction Minimum Travel to something really tiny, like 0.01mm, to force it to retract on every move.

Also set Minimum Extrusion Distance Window to something 1mm or so that it won't reach its usual retraction limit.

 

Depending on your material and extruder, this might grind it up a bit, so the results could be subpar because of that (it'll end up at an uneven thickness) but while I've never done anything that tiny, I have done this sort of thing and a decent PLA can stand up to a bit.

[Snoopster 0]

Thanks for your response. Apologies for the delay, I only received a notification for it today.

You are spot on, it was the slicer retraction settings that were preventing the printer from bothering to retract. Altering Retraction min travel down to 0.5mm began to show improvements but then the scale numbers quality started to degrade.

I am using an Ender3 pro V2, so as you say maybe i was pushing the bowden tube extruder beyond its limits.

I decided to change the scale design to join the tops and bottoms of the graduations..... a bit of a cop out.

[Slashee_the_Cow 417]

I'm not sure if it'd make much of a difference but you could try turning on Travel > Z Hop When Retracted. Slows down the process a little bit (giving the extruder time to catch up) but not sure if it's enough to make a difference, plus even if it does have more time to retract that's not going to make a huge amount of difference if there's still anything outside the nozzle.