I’m pretty new to 3d printing as I just got an Ender 3 Max Neo for Christmas. I’ve been playing around with various filaments from Inland and Creality, but I’m having odd results with the Creality ones.
When using the Creality filaments, my prints get random holes, or outright fail, because of gaps when it’s extruding. The roll is not tangled and my extruder doesn’t appear to be slipping. I’ve tried adjusting speed, temperatures, flow, z offset, etc, but nothing is fixing the random gaps. The Inland filaments are working great and are very consistent. Any help is appreciated.
Are you sure the extruder isn’t slipping? I had some issues on my ender 3 v1 because I wasn’t extruding hot enough or slow enough, especially with certain brands. That resulted in the filament coming out way slower than expected, but some did come out. It would extrude some, skip to catch up, extrude more.
Not that I’m aware of as I don’t hear any odd noise from the extruder or see marks on the filament. I’m new to this though so I probably don’t know what to look for. What told you that yours was slipping?
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the obvious skipping click noise and the extruder wheel reversing for just a moment.
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stop the print, pull out all the filament and there will be small dished out sections. Not the gear teeth impressions, those are normal, but imagine the gear chewing up that filament.
That’s what I imagined I’d see or hear and I’m not seeing any of that. I’ll take a closer look again though now that I know for sure. Thanks!
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maybe the creality filaments are moist? Do you hear popping noises? if so then try drying em in a dehydrator.
I had something like this on my Ender 3 Pro, and because I had/have calibrated much of the system the retraction distance that is in the default profile was pulling in air, causing pop/bubbles in every layer after a retraction.
I dropped retraction from 6.5mm to 4mm and all the bubbles went away.
I played around with retraction a bit, but I’ll give that another shot. Thanks for the input.
I have no experience with that filament, but some of them are crap. For each filament you should find the best temp and flow. You sad you tried diferent settings, but have you done temp/flow/retraction tower calibration? You can try disabling retractions for testing, again some filaments are bad and sometimes retractions are just too frequent (compare by printing exact same model). As others said it can also be wet filament. Some filaments require diferent tension on extruder arm, but you can tell by looking at the teeth marks. At the end you want filament and settings that work best for you, I love polymaker
Is there a pattern to where the gaps are happening? Like are they always where the beginning of a layer starts printing or are they interspersed throughout layers? I recently had a similar problem with my K1 and some random filaments that were a few years old where the start/end points of my layers had holes, almost like the start of the extrusion was lagging behind the movement or the stopping of the extrusion was happening prematurely. I never really figured out the core problem because I just switched to vase mode because it worked nicely for the model I was printing. But I thought about playing with my retraction settings in case I was retracting too much or adjusting my nozzle temp in case these rolls just weren’t flowing when melted like they used to (but it sounds like you’ve tried that already). And I know it’s a bit cliche at this point but you might want to try drying your filament especially if you’re hearing pops from the nozzle when it’s printing.
It seems to be randomly within a layer rather than at the start and changes to retraction don’t seem to improve it. Oddly enough, I’m noticing on a more recent print that it seems to happen more frequently within supports (generated by Cura), which I think are printed faster.
I’ll try drying the filament. All of my Creality filament is from Amazon, where as the Inland stuff is all from my local Micro Center. I wonder if the filament from Amazon is just sitting around for a while, or in poor conditions.