I’m having a lot of stringing in my prints, and turning the temperature down doesn’t seem to help much… I know that the next thing to try is retraction, but I also know that that’s very prone to clogging if you’re not careful? What retraction settings (speed and distance) is good to use for the J1s for PLA?
You can try a retraction test, all sorts on Thingaverse. I myself print pla at 230 deg with retraction at 40mm/s with 1.8mm length. I have the all-metal hotends.
Best not to do more than 2 mm retraction.
I also chased stringing problems for a while. Felt like I tried everything you’d normally check.
Eventually I noticed it was specifically when printing small features. Extrusions that were only a few mm or less.
I found the experimental Cura setting that reduces speed for small features. I set that to slow way down if a feature is 5 mm or less (still with fast travel speed) and that fixed 95% of my problem. Probably just not cooling enough before it moved on from little dots.
And dry filament, of course. 
That experimental Cura setting sounds perfect; do you remember what it was called? I can’t find it in Cura 5.9, even among the experimental settings, even with the settings menu set to ‘all’; the closest I found is “small layer printing temperature”…
Under Experimental (at least in Cura 5.5 
) it’s Small Max Hole Size, Small Max Feature Length, and Small Feature Speed:
IIRC, you may also need to adjust the minimum speed, depending how much you slow down. This one I went a little nuts and dropped to just 10% speed, which for me would be… really really slow!
It does make prints take longer, but it’s a cool feature since it only slows down where needed. I think in later prints I set it for like 25% speed and max small feature length of 5 or 10 mm.
(There’s also an option for slowing down automatically on overhangs!)
For illustration, here’s a “retraction” torture test. Just 4 spires.
First, me going nuts trying everything I could think of and getting no where using normal PLA. You can see all the stringing and tendrils that are forming no matter what I do:
A few days later when I find the settings to slow way down on small extrusions, but still keep a fast travel speed. This time using red silk PLA:
“No matter what I do” was drying, retraction speed, retraction distance, slowing down a little bit, different travel speeds, other things I don’t even remember. Eventually very slow extrusion and a snappy travel speed worked best.
Once I did that, it really didn’t care as much about retraction speed or distance. The stock values were fine.
Aha! For anyone else looking for this option in the future: “small feature speed” only appears in the of options list once “small hole max size” is set higher than zero!
I’ll give this option a try soon and see if it helps, thank you!
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You’re welcome. This made me think I was going insane, so I hope it helps you.
I actually came across this while trying to print the dual color benchy in my profile picture. The little black details were super stringy at first and it took a while to figure it out! Came out really nice after that.