There are a lot of potential causes for stringing, or spider webs. Some of the most common are poor retraction settings, poor temperature settings, and an improperly calibrated extruder.
Also, keep in mind that ambient temperature can affect stringing if you don’t have an enclosure.
The first thing that I do if I find that my printer is stringing is print a retraction tower, a temperature tower, and recalibrate my extruder. This takes 30 minutes and saves tons of time.
Banding, or horizontal lines in your 3d print, can come from many things. A few possible causes are:
Why get a 3d printer? What value do they bring? Personally, I think they solve many problems that the manufacturing industry has struggled with. Prototyping, for example, comes to mind. It might take the tool shop a week to build a prototype part just to see if something will fit in an assembly. If you just need to check the overall envelope, you can often do it much quicker on a 3d printer and iterate through the design process.
Personally, I use mine all the time to solve problems at home. My wife can’t find curtain tie backs that she likes? Fine, she can just sit with me while I design something and then I’ll print it for her.
We inherited a TV over the weekend. My father-in-law had it mounted on a wall in his workshop and he had thrown away the feet for it several years ago. He gave it to us and I thought it would be a good learning opportunity for my kids to learn how to solve problems. I had them design some feet for it. Their first step was to create a drawing on paper. I’m old fashioned. I still believe that if you can’t put it on paper then you probably have no business trying to put it on cad. Once I approved of their design they had to sit down and draft their new idea. Then they had to print it. What you see below is how a 10 year old solved the problem of a TV having no feet.
Sometimes, the Bowden tube will pop out of the extruder. It can happen at either end, but I have found that it happens much more frequently at the extruder end.
This can be caused by two things:
I’ve seen some users having issues when using Cura 5. After doing some experiments myself, talking to some folks, and looking around through the help forums, it seems to me that Cura 4 profiles don’t carry over well into Cura 5. I’ve personally had the best success, and seen others with the same conclusions, when they create brand new profiles in Cura 5. The default action is for Cura 5 to import all of your Cura 4 profiles. It will work, but most users end up with ugly prints. I’ve found that Cura 5 works much better when I create brand new Cura 5 profiles and update them.
I read a user’s help request in an online forum that was interesting because it illustrates what can happen from time to time. The symptom that the user was experiencing was that there was way too much squish in their first layer of printing. It was almost non-existant.
They were stumped for a while as to what the cause was. In reading through their comments and the things that they tried, it turned out that they had a BLTouch. Basically, what had happened was that they had set up a mesh bed level manually, and then they allowed the BLTouch to override that stored level. A misconfigured BLTouch was the culprit, in this case. It was going through the motions, but it was storing an inadequate bed level, which was overriding the valid mesh bed level that they had stored previously.
This is probably the most difficult thing to troubleshoot, and I had it happen to me a while ago. After checking everything that I could think of, I tried a test print. It worked, ah, what a relief. I tried a few more prints. So far so good. Now to go ahead and try the overnight print. It failed at around hour 12 or 13. Ugh. Back to the drawing board. After going through several logs, I found a T0 error. Ah, something to look into.
In my case, it turns out that my temperature sensor wire was frayed. A $12 replacement fixed it, probably something that I should have done to begin with.
Live and learn.
Sometimes people want to create parts that have an aesthetic top surface. This can be done with the ironing function in Cura. It’s similar to ironing clothes, in the sense that it uses the heat from your nozzle to smooth out the top surface. One caveat, though, is that that it only works on flat top surfaces.
“My filament keeps snapping off!”
I hear this a lot. This is almost always the result of too much tension on the extruder. Most extruders have a knob that is used to adjust the amount of tension on the filament. Too little tension and your filament slips and you will have underextrusion issues.
Too much tension and your filament will look like it has bite marks on it or even snap off. Find the sweet spot in between.
I frequently get requests for help, or see help requests that are something like “my printer isn’t working right, how do I fix it?”
Such a vague description of what’s going on makes it very difficult to troubleshoot. It could be a setting, it could have something to do with the machine, it might even be your filament. For that matter, it might be the environment. When I first started I had my printer right next to an AC vent and it would throw off my prints every time the AC came on.
Most people in the help forums want to help you, but they need some basic information to be able to do so. What have you tried already? Provide some details about what is going wrong. Describe your machine, how long you have had it, any issues you have had with it in the past.
As far as some basic troubleshooting. Try a generic Cura profile (or other slicer of choice). Go through your machine and make sure everything is tightened and running smoothly. Make sure that your machine is calibrated and that your bed is level. Make sure that your filament is clean and dry. Doing these things will eliminate 75% of problems that you will experience with your printer.
