yeah, i’m leaning towards some kind of flow issue, maybe temp related? in the last pic you can see some roughness and delamination:
i just wanted to jump in and throw out some other ideas since it seemed like everyone was getting to the point of ruling out machine settings. but your idea of a partial clog could be the culprit as well.
I also believe that I might be doing something wrong in the slicer settings. I initialy started palying around with E steps and k factor as I noticed these inconsistences, but both before and after the changes, there were similar issues.
I wait to see what this latest print results will be, as I recalculated everything.
In any case, I use Cura. Below you can see my settings. I snipped everything, just in case!
Similar effects were also to 0.16 and 0.2, but as I mentioned in a previous comment for some reason my E-step was reset to the original value… So lets hope that with the print that I currently have going, there will be some extra clue to help find out what is wrong.
It seems like surrounding geometry will affect the line appearance as a general rule - is it possible to fine tune it away? probably, but i think to a degree thats just part of 3d printing too… i think it looks pretty good to be honest, at least compared to the original prints you had shown.
You can tell that the lines look different where the tapered bottom meet the beam and then again where the tapered top beam meets it again.
Perhaps a tighter infill would help it some? Maybe if it was a little hotter it might hide it better too?
I don’t know that it will get a whole lot better than that, the material surrounding the extrusion on all sides will affect how it lays out .
Perhaps if you reduced the cooling or had it in an enclosure the temp would remain consistent longer and help to hide it as well?
The first print I posted had more visible problems, that is why I started with that. It is a lithophane so layer to layer can change a lot, and that really helped me to figure out if those lines had a pattern.
Printer is in an enclosure (not the original, but still it is an enclosure), so there should not be any big temperature variation during the print.
Do you notice the bridge overextruding and pushing a “bow wave” of filament towards the end?
Because the bridge is solid there’s no place for any overextrusion to go, like there is with the sparse infill.
This structure matches the internal structure of the print, where the bridge goes from solid, to infill, back to solid:
I think you need to take a break from this print specifically, and do some tests with something that has a similar shape, namely solid infill that’s long and thing. Maybe even a smaller piece of this model.
I have a prediction that if you print a small 20mm cube at 100% infill it will be horribly overextruded. I still something is wrong with the slicer. Perhaps it’s infill overlap at the wall-skin boundary, that’s something I had to tweak in my settings.
My settings compensate for 0.035mm of backlash at the start, that would partially test for that too.
The official backlash spec’d value is 0.02mm, I think I’ve since changed the start gcode to only compensate 0.02 but I haven’t updated my S3D profile, so that one was sliced with 0.035. Oh well. Easy to change, it’s the M425 X0.035 Y0.035 Z0.035 F1 S0 line at the start, change all the 0.035 to 0.02
Although my X axis has developed a more severe backlash, it now gets 0.11mm :(. Something needs to be tightened.