I used to be able to print things. Now for the past 6 months or so I’ve wasted spools upon spools trying to print anything and this always happens. I’m just about ready to sell this machine and give up on the whole thing.
Is there anything glaringly obvious that springs to any of your expert minds?
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Thank you everyone!
With the initial suggestions regarding nozzle cleaning, I watched a couple YouTube videos and did a cold pull on the nozzle. Additionally I did also scrub the plate with dish soap and got it nice and purdy clean. The initial few layers now are going - dare I say - ideally.
Thank you again for your help!
@antaymonkey Hooray! I’m glad you got it sorted!
I had to regularly clean my Prusa build plate with dish soap and water. I would then chase it with an alcohol wipe and glue stick for good measure. (It was a smooth PEI sticker that was losing its stick.)
I’ve heard a regular wipe-down with Windex and a microfiber cloth can help maintain the stick. Haven’t tried that yet.
First thing that springs to my mind is bad adhesion. Have you washed the bed with dishsoap recently? Usually not touching the bed with your fingers is enough but sometimes I need to “reset” by giving it a good wash.
When was the last time you replaced your nozzle? Could be a clogged nozzle. Your first layer is quite bad. There’s a lot that could be going wrong. Have you followed Elliot’s tuning guide?
You may want to try calibrating but I’d imagine it’s something with the nozzle. Could be there’s a bit of filament that needs to be cleaned or nozzle is too worn and needs replaced.
People don’t understand that the nozzle needs to be calibrated…
When I see first layer issues like this, my go to steps are:
- Wash the build plate with hot water and soap to remove any built up glue, dry, and reapply a thin layer of glue stick
- Turn the initial layer speed way down, like 10mm/sec, and 20mm/sec for infill.
I’ve heard some people say never use glue stick
And honestly, with modern build plates, there is absolutely no reason to use glue. At least for PLA.
If things are working for you without glue, there’s no need to mess with it. Personally, I like having an extra barrier between my model and build plate to make removal easier, plus I’m paranoid about damaging the plate. What was the reasoning for never using glue stick?
My reasoning was that it was unnecessary (with PLA) and would make you have to clean the build plate more.
Gotcha, I’ll give this a shot next time!
What, are you me?? I’ve had exactly that problem on exactly the same printbed with exactly the same color filament. It also only started happening a while ago, it was fine before. Ender 3 v3 SE here. I done know why but I fixed it by wiping the printbed with some soap and water and switching to prusa slicer from cura. Works pretty well now, so maybe try that.
It was fixed by removing residue from the print bed which reduced adhesion for the first few layers, pulling the filament up, which gets stuck on the nozzle and is being dragged across the bed.
Clean your bed regularly every couple of prints.
Yeah, I’ve seen that reply too, but only after posting this… Anyway, I do enjoy many of the new features that Prusa slicer has so maybe all the trouble was worth it, don’t think I would have tried it otherwise
What model printer is this? Looks like an Ender 3 plate to me.
Ender 3 V3
Okay, I had the exact same printer and I likely know exactly what’s going on because I also had adhesion issues in the beginning.
First off, if you have a textured plate, you should not need glue. Clean that plate thoroughly with soap and water and allow it to dry on a heated bed for a little while. You can also chase the water with alcohol to get it to dry quicker, but still let it get a good dry time.
Next, go into the printer and have it do a full recalibration for bed leveling and z offset height. Once it is done, go back into the printer and manually lower the z offset. The automatic z offset gets pretty close, but not quite good enough. For my printer I found that lowering it by -0.07 mm was a great starting point. Anytime you auto level or recalibrate the bed it will reset this number, and honestly you don’t need to do it very often unless you perform maintenance or tighten something. My theory is that the automatic z offset height is sensing the very top of the texture of the bed, and is not taking the texture itself into consideration. You need to lower the nozzle on the z offset to get it to squish the plastic down into the texture of the bed.
After you make an adjustment, scale this print down to be 100 mm x 100 mm x 0.1 mm.
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6130105It should only print one layer high. Check the quality of the print afterwards and pay close attention to the amount of squish and overlap of the plastic. The perfect amount of z offset should be completely smooth without any gaps. For my printer I tended to go a little bit lower just to get a little extra squish and bed adhesion, which showed some slight, raised ridges between the nozzle passes. This will smooth out by the second or third layer.
After all of this, consider raising your bed temperature to 60C for PLA. I found creality’s default bed temp of 55 to be a little too conservative.
Lastly, if you are trying to print at 0.1 mm layer height, you need to override your first layer thickness to be 0.2 mm. Also, don’t print anything tall with that layer height. I think there is some sort of error buildup that would cause my printer to knock things off of the bed after 145 mm.
It’s a good printer but you definitely still have to tweak things like a typical printer. Overall, it was that z offset that was the culprit for a lot of my adhesion issues in the beginning. Anything after that just helps.
Edit: After looking it again at the picture, you can clearly see the gaps between the nozzle passes in your first layer. I am very confident that your z offset is too high. The plastic is lifting up a little bit and then when your printer heading for the second layer, it’s colliding with the plastic and ripping things up.
Thank you! This is fantastically helpful!
Heat up the bed and then do the manual paper level. Check the levelness of the gantry. Then do a automatic bed leveling. Looks like you are using Crealitys shitty build surface that is known to delaminate and bubble with heat. While its warm press around the plate and see of it has bubble spots because if it does then when it auto levels it will be dips and high places. You may want to replace the build surface with a spring steel or glass.
On top of what’s already been said, maybe try tweaking your z offset
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