CR-10 Prints are turning out TERRIBLE! Help troubleshooting

[Nifty]

After years of printing tons of stuff without much issue, I tried to print Benchy (.2mm height, 60mm/s) and got this monstrosity:


Um... ok.

Must be bad filament. Lemme try another filament I know works:




WHAT IS GOING ON!?!?

Seriously?!?!

No idea what's happening, so I'm doing some troubleshooting.

My first guesses are:

1) Problems with the belts and/or rollers (when I disable stepper motors and move the bed, it feels like it's "catching" in places)
2) Lose hot-end (I wiggled it an was surprised how wobbly it is)

UGH!

 

[Nifty]

Ok, I think I got it fixed!

Not sure what did it, but here's the list:

• Dismantled the hot-end, cleaned up all the dust bunnies, put it all back together nice and snug (no more wobble)
• Replaced the nozzle from .8mm to a new .4mm (dang it prints SLOW compared to .8!!!)
• Tried to tighten the Y belt (seemed tight already, but snugged it up)
• Replaced the mirror bed (that had a mag sheet below it) with a new mirror alone, and taped it down solid
• Perfectly leveled the bed
• Updated CURA 4.8 to 4.10 and started with a perfectly clean profile to remove any "bad edits" I might have set

Here's the result of my .2mm 60mm/s Benchy (took 2 hours to print):

 

[Nifty]

Ok, since that turned out so well (and because I can't stand printing so slowly) I decided to up-the-ante by:

• Increasing nozzle to .6mm
• Increasing layer height to .4mm (basically doubling)
• Going back to the first filament I had started with (yellow)
• Kept print speed at 60 mm/s

Result was not bad, and with a print time of 50 mins (less than half):

 

[stratman]

If this were a vote then I would vote redux #1.

How long do others take to print with the same quality?

 

[ninj]

I printed this yesterday in 1 hour 0m 42 s on my Ender 3 to test some new filament (the chimney went bad because the print detached itself at that point). Mostly unmodded apart from an SKR Mini 2.0 board running Klipper firmware (Klipper is one of the best free upgrades for any printer IMO, especially on the old 8-bit boards). Settings: 0.2mm layers, 2 perims, 18% cubic infill; speeds: internal perims 70mm/s, external: 50mm/s, infill:80mm/s, travel speed: 200mm/s. Acceleration: 3000mm/s^2. Using Klipper's pressure advance and input shaping (the latter reduces ringing). Those are conservative settings, I often print at 90-100mm/s with good results.

 

[stratman]

I printed this yesterday

Why are there areas of white spots/dots when the filament appears brownish?

 

[Nifty]

I printed this yesterday in 1 hour 0m 42 s on my Ender 3 to test some new filament (the chimney went bad because the print detached itself at that point). Mostly unmodded apart from an SKR Mini 2.0 board running Klipper firmware (Klipper is one of the best free upgrades for any printer IMO, especially on the old 8-bit boards). Settings: 0.2mm layers, 2 perims, 18% cubic infill; speeds: internal perims 70mm/s, external: 50mm/s, infill:80mm/s, travel speed: 200mm/s. Acceleration: 3000mm/s^2. Using Klipper's pressure advance and input shaping (the latter reduces ringing). Those are conservative settings, I often print at 90-100mm/s with good results.


View attachment 12711

Wow!

Clearly I have a bit of tuning to do! Your results are better than mine at 1/2 the print time!

 

[Nifty]

@The Hat, etc. peeps with printers:

Have you ever printed a Benchy? I'd love to see your results / tests at "standard settings" (0.2mm height / 60mm/s) and then other "faster" settings and how long the prints take and what the quality looks like!

 

[ninj]

Why are there areas of white spots/dots when the filament appears brownish?

They're just overexposed areas - it's not like that in real life. Printed in Sunlu copper silk PLA+, so very shiny and tricky to photograph. The photo doesn't really capture the colour and metallic look very well.

 

[ninj]

Wow!

Clearly I have a bit of tuning to do! Your results are better than mine at 1/2 the print time!

Thanks. I think the secret is pumping up the acceleration, otherwise even relatively modest speeds can't be reached, especially on small-sized prints. So slicing at 60mm/s might really only get printed at, say, 40mm/s. I strongly recommend looking into Klipper Firmware (for this and other reasons). On my stock Ender 3 I couldn't get good results with accelerations above 1500mm/s^2, but Klipper enables crazy accelerations and speeds if tuned properly (pressure advance got my retractions down to 2.5mm and input shaping enables high speeds without ringing artifacts).