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Troubleshooting degraded quality in prints on a MK3s  

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Christian Riesen
(@christian-riesen)
New Member
Troubleshooting degraded quality in prints on a MK3s

Hello. So I tried searching but it's hard to find something that matches what I'm seeing. If someone has a post that already describes this, please let me know the link or what keywords I should search for to find it, thanks.

My MK3s has been printing for years really great. Upgrade from Mk3 to Mk3s was also painless. I gotten many smooth and absolutely perfect prints from this little machine, it was always fire and forget, and I get a great print.

At first it made some ugly top surfaces, but I wasn't worried, lots of things I print are more structural, less visually appealing. Then it started to fail on that too.

This is the bottom of the print. You can see this already creates a horrible first layer, in patches. This is a 0.4 nozzle, 0.3 layer height and the print is a square with 54 mm sides.

Bottom of print

The inconsistent base already is a bit problematic, specially for this print, I need a good solid bottom surface.

Next the sides are an absolute terror.

Side of print

It's inconsistent as hell and I can pluck the layers appart with no effort whatsoever. There is near zero structural support here.

And to cap it off, top surface and supports.

No supports

As you can see the topsurface looks even worse. That rats nest shouldd have been a line of supports, you can see where they should have been on the zigzag lines on the left wall area about 2/3 from the front.

I've been checking screws and belts (not every single one, but pretty much every screw I could access from the outside, and nothing was loose). The filament in this print is new, but it happened on older filament as well (all PETG, all the same vendor+brand) and I have many great prints from the previous spool. I cleaned the nozzle and heater block area with a brass brush to make sure nothing comes into the print and prohibits clean printing.

Any ideas where this comes from and how I can restore my printer to it's old goodness?

Posted : 25/05/2022 6:45 pm
FoxRun3D
(@foxrun3d)
Famed Member
RE: Troubleshooting degraded quality in prints on a MK3s

Partially cloggged nozzle? Have you tried cold pulls? Anything blocking the filament path?

Formerly known on this forum as @fuchsr -- until all hell broke loose with the forum software...

Posted : 25/05/2022 8:39 pm
Christian Riesen
(@christian-riesen)
New Member
Topic starter answered:
RE: Troubleshooting degraded quality in prints on a MK3s

 

Posted by: @fuchsr

Partially cloggged nozzle? Have you tried cold pulls? Anything blocking the filament path?

Will give it a try and see if that helps, thanks.

Posted : 25/05/2022 8:41 pm
Christian Riesen
(@christian-riesen)
New Member
Topic starter answered:
RE: Troubleshooting degraded quality in prints on a MK3s

One thing I did now was to change to the Prusa slicer (originally used Simplify 3D, which ran perfectly fine with the Prusa profile until recently) and used the fast 0.2 layer profile for slicing. This produced not a perfect part, but at least a very good one right off the bat. Nothing else changed. So looks like the prusa profile is more forgiving when dealing with whatever is this inconsistency I'm getting.

I'll still do some cold pulls though just to see if there is some blockage and to ensure I can keep printing well for the forseeable future.

Posted : 26/05/2022 7:11 pm
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