Should my wipe tower look like this?
I've noticed that my wipe tower sometimes, but not always, has these intermittent extrusions on it:
Is this normal behavior, or a sign that something's wrong?
There doesn't seem to be much consistency in when this happens. It happens with different filaments from different manufacturers (pictured are Overture and Fillamentum), and during the same print, sometimes happens and sometimes does not. I tried increasing temperature by 5 degrees with no apparent effect.
Sometimes these little intermittent extrusions can be left sticking up a bit and scrape on the nozzle as it passes. I suspect (but not certain) that they're contributing to some wipe tower blobbing and layer shifting I'm sometimes getting in longer prints.
The first thing I might suspect is friction in the filament path leading to underextrusion, but I've already done quite a lot to decrease the fillament path friction even beyond the stock enclosure setup.
RE: Should my wipe tower look like this?
That is actually normal! It depends on how many color changes are required per layer. When there are fewer changes on lower layers, the tower reserves space to support more changes on the higher layers.
However, your tower looks awfully long. Have you changed any other settings related to the tower? Are you using a high flow nozzle? If so, it wastes about 3 times as much as a standard flow nozzle.
MK4S/MMU3
RE: Should my wipe tower look like this?
Hi LarGriff, thanks for the reply!
To clarify, I'm not asking about the "empty" space in the tower near the front - I know that is normal, and the space is used later on in the print job. What I'm asking about is the horizontal "dashed" pattern of the extrusions. Sometimes this looks like a single, continuous extrusion (no dashes), like the pattern shown at the very rear of the tower in the photo. But sometimes they have this intermittent "dashed" pattern, like with the gray and white extrusions closer to the center of the tower. Sometimes these little bits poke up and scrape the nozzle.
The tower is particularly long because I doubled the space between purges (in an effort to solve a possibly-separate possibly-related globbing issue). I've noticed the "dashed" pattern with all default settings too, though. The nozzle is a non-HF ObXidian nozzle.
RE: Should my wipe tower look like this?
Here's another photo, later on in the print, showing the pattern in more detail. The surface of the wipe tower is also pretty rough and significantly scrapes the nozzle on subsequent passes.
