Hi everyone,
I’m having a weird issue with text such as the one in this image. Big or small, fancy or regular, all text comes out looking like it does in the image - cracked and hollow. I’ve spent the last few days trying to figure out why, and I’m stumped.
I’ve tried printing slower and slower and adding more and more top layers (the bottom 2 bottle caps are completely solid with 100% infil), but it doesn’t seem to fix the issue.
Here’s what I’m working with:
- Ender 3
- Software 2.0.8.27
- Hardware 4.2.2
- CR Touch
- PrusaSlicer 2.8.0
- MakerBot PLA Filament
- I’ve used various temperatures and speeds. All of them have generated the terrible text you see here
Thanks in advanced for the help!
Update: We seem to be getting somewhere!
The top 2 are the same ones featured in the post above. The bottom left was printed at 110% extrusion and normal speed. The bottom right was printed at 110% extrusion and a much slower speed for the text, and it looks much better! I’m printing another now with higher bridge flow rate (it was 70%, I set it to 85%), so I’ll update again in a few minutes when that finishes!
Thanks for the information about calibrating e steps from everyone! It’s getting late, so I don’t want to mess around with that tonight, but I’ll give it a shot tomorrow!
Update 2: welp.
That’s possibly the worst one yet. I’m reprinting the bigger insert piece seen in the original post to check if my printer simply can’t do that quality or if it’s the e steps. If it’s e steps, I’m going to bed…
Update 3:
Welp, seems like it’s the e-step. However, it’s too late for me to care about that right now, so I’m going to bed. Thanks for the help everyone! I’ll work on fixing the issue tomorrow
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The bottom two which are supposed to be completely solid aren’t even filling in the caps themselves. You’re not getting enough filament flowing through the nozzle. Are you using a 100% flow rate in your slicer? You might try printing at 110% with a one- or two-layer solid test to see how well it fills in.
If you have never calibrated your e-steps, you’ve probably been under-extruding and just never noticed the problem on previous prints. Always a good idea to check this if you haven’t before. This might be solved by adjusting the flow rate, but it’s better to properly calibrate your printer or you will still see problems in some areas.
Alternatively, you might have a partial clog in the nozzle. Try doing a cold-pull to remove anything that’s in there and see if it clears up the problem. No changes in the slicer will resolve this, it’s a mechanical problem.
It’s probably also worthwhile to measure the filament with calipers to see how close to 1.75mm it actually is. If you previously had a spool that was slightly over, it might have been covering up the defects that would be more obvious when using a spool that is slightly under. This problem can be solved just by adjusting the flow rate in the slicer.
You said you have made changes to the temp and speed, but didn’t say what settings you are using or have tried. Please post that info (along with anything that may have worked in the past) for reference. Also are you sure you got pure PLA, or is it a variant like PLA+?
So despite having this printer for a while, I’m unsure of what a few things you’ve asked.
First, the stuff I know how to answer:
- afaik, it’s regular PLA. I bought it second hand but still fully sealed in the vacuum bag, so I’m not 1000% sure, but it only says PLA.
- I unclogged the nozzle within the last couple of weeks with a cold pull. It was having issues with text before and after the unclogging.
- The width seems unlikely. This problem has persisted through 2 filament brands. Unfortunately I don’t have calipers to test that with at the moment.
- The settings I used for the bigger bottlecap (the one split into 2 pieces) were the default "0.08 mm SUPERDETAIL (0.4mm Nozzle) @ CREALITY found on PrusaSlicer. The bottom left cap used a semi-custom version of the same profile where I knocked the speed down to half. Figured it might have been too slow since the text came out way worse than the bottom right, which was printed on the “0.12 mm DETAIL” preset. If you don’t have access to PrusaSlicer, I’d be happy to copy over some of the settings.
- Looking through PrusaSlicer, I don’t see any settings for flow speed other than Bridge Flow Speed, but I will get to googling and find it.
The main thing I don’t understand is calibrating e-steps. I’m unsure of what an e-step is.
Thanks for the quick (and detailed!) reply!
For calibrating your printer, I always recommend https://teachingtechyt.github.io/calibration.html. Everything is step-by-step and helps teach you about the calibrations and what different settings do. I agree with the other commenter that you’re underextruding, based on your layers not filling in. Getting your E-steps calibrated is extremely important, then I’d start working on flow rates (which can change between rolls and brands)
You’ll want to google the exact steps for calibrating e-steps, but basically this is the setting that determines how many steps of the stepper motor are required to move the filament a given amount. You disconnect the bowden tube from the head, then push the filament through so a bit is exposed past the end of the tubing and mark exactly where the end of the tubing is on the filament. Now from your slicer you instruct the printer to extrude 100mm of filament, and very carefully measure how much actually comes out. If you have exactly 100mm then great, but typically you will find it off by a few mm (and in your case it’s probably less than 100mm). It doesn’t take much to cause a big problem. Any how-to page will show how you can read the current setting (I think it’s 92 steps by default), and there are formulas which will calculate the new number you need to change that to.
So the idea here is that if the slicer thinks it should be outputting 100mm of filament, but it only pushes 95mm instead, you won’t have enough filament to fill in the gaps. Setting the correct value on the printer will fix this, and then you can adjust more minor issues by changing the flow rate in the slicer. You will also note that different types or brands of filament extrude at slightly different rates, which is why your slicer may allow different profiles for the filament itself.
I’m not familiar with PrusaSlicer. Cura has always worked well for me, it’s free, and it provides quite a lot of options for fine-tuning your prints. If you find that Prusa doesn’t let you adjust the filament rate, give Cura a try.
I’m reprint the bottom 2 caps now using the profile I did the bottom left in, but now with 110% extrusion! Wish me luck!
You should only need to see a few layers to tell if there’s still a problem. No need to waste filament printing a complete failed piece.
Oh I should have mentioned in the previous post… if a cold-pull doesn’t make any difference, have you checked the nozzle itself? It’s a very tiny hole, easily damaged, so if the head smacked into anything it might have slightly crushed the tip (not something you would see by eye). You could also try clearing the nozzle with the long needle that came with the printer – if it doesn’t fit into the nozzle tip then it’s almost certainly suffered some damage. Always keep a bag of spare nozzles on hand!
The Nozzle’s recently been changed from one I managed to completely clog, as well as having been thoroughly cleaned. When I got this thing up and running again, I did everything shy of a complete reassembly for cleaning. I’m not sure about the crushed tip part. I’ve long since lost the needle that came with the printer, but I can run out to Walmart tomorrow and grab a new one to check.
I’m also just using these bottlecaps as markers that only I’ll be able to see, so their overall quality isn’t super important, I just want to improve future prints, and this lets me test out text quality. Figured I’d just knock out 2 birds with one stone!
That works, just keep testing changes until you figure it out.
May be a stupid question, but are you hearing any clicking from the extruder while printing? If the brass gear gets clogged up it can start slipping. Or if there’s not enough tension on the spring it might not push the filament through reliably. For that matter have you printed an arm to change the angle the filament feeds into the extruder (if you still have the spool in the stock position on top of the printer)? There are many better ways to handle that issue, but original setup causes a lot of friction and you’ll actually see the filament cutting a groove into the extruder, and the arm is the easiest print to solve it. You pretty much want to check everything that might be causing the filament to drag or not allow it to feed smoothly into the head.
I’m seeing a few filament guides for the ender 3 on thingiverse. Would you recommend either of these?
The second one with the blue arm is the style I was talking about. It changes the angle so the filament doesn’t get pulled into the extruder at a right-angle. It will help for now, but there are other models that use a ball bearing for a spinning wheel that the filament rolls over. And if you really want to make it smooth, there are ball bearing rollers so the whole spool spins more freely. That’s one of the things I love about this printer, there is such a range of mods you can print to make the whole machine better.
The upper right print, which is the only one that I can really see clearly, looks under extruded on the top layer. You either have a partial clog, your e-stepe might be ore, or if your printer has always produced top layers that look like that with the filament you’re currently using you need to calibrate (extrusion multiplier and/or temp).
At a minimum, I suggest double checking e-steps (should take you about 1 minute after your extruder is hot) and your extrusion multiplier.
I would also check the sliced preview. Ideally all the perimeters of the letters can be the same width. If this isn’t the case, tweak perimeter width until you get there. I’ve found this results in the lowest chances of having a gap in the middle of these types of thin multi-walled features.
That said, FDM printers have was more resolution in the z axis than they do on x and y. You will be able to get cleaner text, but there’s only so far you can take it.
Thanks for the feedback!
I’m testing the bottle caps on 110% extrusion right now. Hopefully that’ll solve the issue, cause I have no idea how to go about following that guide on my ender 3. It just says “use the web interface”, which my cheap af ender 3 doesn’t have
I personally like https://teachingtechyt.github.io/calibration.html for all of the above. It provides gcode and stl files based on your input. I’ve had great success using it for my Ender 3.
Ignore all the stuff that says Klipper. Install the program called pronterface and then hook up your printer to your computer with USB. You can then run the commands the guide tells you.
You should really figure out how to calibrate the esteps if you never have before, it’ll save you a headache. This tutorial is a good visual: https://youtu.be/6PL_rSPZ3M8
Just adding to your comment that if OP goes that route, he will need to cover 5v pin with some electrical tape on usb otherwise he will wreck is printer board. (Unless recent ender 3 have this issue fixed but I doubt)
I’ve never heard of that issue before. I have a 2020 year Ender 3 and we have a half dozen at work also around the same age and have run all of them through USB with no problem
If you make a search “ender 3 5v pin”, you will find plenty of examples on Reddit, octoprint forum and others. Problem was (or is) that printer was still getting power when OFF, it could lead to plenty of issues with worst case scenario where the mainboard died.
I gotcha. Sounds like as long as you connect USB only when the printer is powered on then you shouldn’t have issues
To do the e-step process on your ender 3, you would need to open your favorite notepad application, copy/paste the g-code on that site, save the text file as .gcode, and get that g-code to your ender 3 (SD card, etc).
The same is true for the extrusion multiplier test - you would set the test up in your slicer, slice it, and then print. Some slicers, like orca slicer and super slicer, have a built in extrusion multiplier test that makes it very easy to do this.
You definitely needs to calibrate your estep and flow rate as others mentioned. If numbers were correct then you might have a partial clog. If so, clean it and check Luke’s hotend fix on thingiverse/printable (really worth it). https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7tCxO17XZtw
Under extrusion aside, you can get better text details by using a smaller nozzle as one issue for the text clarity is line width, while it isn’t ideal you can also try to set 0.30/0.35 line width with 0.4 nozzle.
Also, if you do plug in usb from your computer to printer (to calibrate estep), make sure to cover the 5v pin on usb cable with electrical tape. Otherwise you might wreck your printer mainboard. https://community.octoprint.org/t/put-tape-on-the-5v-pin-why-and-how/13574
Follow up comment based on the edit: is the layer under the text supposed to be solid? Those gaps are very big. What does your first layer look like? If it’s fine your e-steps are way off (this would impact all the prints you’ve ever done), you have a partial clog (cold pull or just replace with a fresh brass nozzle since they’re cheap), your extruder is partially skipping, or your temp is too low.
That said, no gaps in the text is progress so yay.
Cura has an option called “print thin walls” I was unable to print and smaller text without it enabled. But when it was enabled, things looked pretty good.
Oh, might give that a shot real quick! Thank you!
Hopefully it’ll help.