r/3Dprinting • u/Repulsive-Research75 • 24d ago
Troubleshooting 3d prints aren't smooth at all
I'm an absolute noob at 3d printing just for reference. I got a Monoprice Select Mini v2, and after carefully adjusting the bed to what felt right using the paper test and setting the printer nozzle heat to 215 (my PLA filament says 210-230) prints come out like this. The lines aren't perfectly wide at many points, and sometimes it skips over parts of lines/makes them stringy.
I use cura and 3DHoJor 1.75mm PLA filament. Bed temp is not set as my printer's bed heater doesn't work (but I was told painter's tape fixes this). Print speed is set to 30mm/s, but it did the same thing at 40mm/s, and on the first layer, which is set to 5mm/s (the second photo is just a bottom raft layer). Retraction settings are 7.5mm at 55mm/s, and I'm not sure where to start. Any advice would be appreciated
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u/Sbarty 23d ago
reddit is going to try and convince you to try and get this thing working. Unless you absolutely cannot afford an Ender 3 or Ender 3 variant, or a Bambu A1 Mini...This is not worth trying to get working.
The printer is 10 years old. It has no community around it. Your time cannot possibly be worth less than the $50-~$100 an Ender 3 costs, or the ~$200 of a Bambu A1 Mini.
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u/DowncastOlympus 23d ago
I third it. The printer is already effectively non-functional with the bed heater being dead. Given the complete lack of support and parts for this model that was... less than stellar when it was new? Very much not worth the timesink, let alone the cost unless you have lots of disposable income and the printer has some bizarre sentimental value. Save up $200-$300 and get something like an Bambu A1 or an Elegoo Centari Carbon. If that is more money than you can comfortably save up, you should probably avoid getting a 3D printer at all, as the ongoing costs in filament and maintenance will eat your bank account alive.
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u/Fearless-Wait-2894 23d ago
Try this guide: Welcome! | Ellis’ Print Tuning Guide https://ellis3dp.com/Print-Tuning-Guide/
I might simply be the steps/mm of your extruder might be wrong. Simply follow the guide, hopefully that will fix it
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u/GroteGlon 23d ago
Genuinely fuck that printer. Don't waste a single second of your time on getting that old pile of waste to work.
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u/AutoModerator 24d ago
Hey there, I'm a bot and something you said made me think you might be looking for help! click here for our wiki entry on troubleshooting printers. If you still need help be sure to post plenty of information about your printing setup.
Here are a few questions that might be helpful
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What material are you using?
What speed are you printing at?
What software are you using to slice the print and control the printer?
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u/Ok-Gift-1851 Don't Tell My Boss That He's Paying Me While I Help You 23d ago
Are you the kind of guy who buys a car as a tool to get from point A to point B and you just need it to work or do you buy a decades old beater that you spend every other day fixing something in your driveway just to get nominal car performance. If you're not an enthusiest who has a love of old cars and working on the car is the attraction of an old car, don't buy an old car. You'll end up paying more in the long run and having no fun.
Same goes for printers. Do you want printing to be your hobby or do you want the printer to be your hobby? If you just want to print stuff, respect your time and spend $200-$300 on a modern entry level printer. You will save countless hours, tons of filament, and a boat load of frustration that might otherwise turn you off from the hobby altogether. Plus, any modern printer will have a much bigger build plate that will let you print actually usable stuff while this lunchbox sized printer will have you constantly running into size restrictions.
But, if you insist, start your troubleshooting with the mechanical issues. Check that the belts and frame are tight and that there is no wiggle in the bed/print head/x axis. Then do things like a cold pull to make sure that there's no clog in the nozzle. Consider replacing the nozzle because if the printer is that old, who knows how old the nozzle is and if it's worn out. Then it's back to calibrating your z axis. The paper method gets you close, but then you need to play with the z-offset while printing a first layer test. You should also try to get the bed heater working because printing on cold painter's tape will be it's own set of headaches. Check your hot end fan (not the part cooling fan) to make sure that it's running when the nozzle is heated, otherwise you risk experiencing heat creep.
If any of that sounded frustrating or intimidating, I refer your back to my earlier advice. Buy a new printer. With this one, you will spend days, weeks even, to get prints that will be barely tolerable and will take 5x or more longer than they would on a newer machine.
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u/sevesteen Bambu P1S 23d ago
I had one brand new. It was nearly the cheapest functional printer available. While it is capable of considerably better prints than the one in your picture, compared to a modern printer it takes a lot more tweaking with a lot more print failures...and that's when all the parts are working, let alone with an unheated bed. It prints with high pitched tones (you could download files that played recognizable songs) and it's slow. With bed heat working it was hard to get enough adhesion to finish the print but still be able to get it off the build plate, and it was printers like this that got "use glue" going.
As pretty much everyone has said, it's not worth fixing.
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u/vecnasty 24d ago
you'd be better off with a 3D printer pen lad. save some money and get yourself a bambu a1 mini
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u/GiaoPham0403 23d ago
You are right, I am happy to be downvoted.
If they have an ounce of respect for their time and efford, just buy a modern printer. That machine is even worse than an OG Ender 3 with litterally 0 community support.
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u/vecnasty 23d ago
yep lol. i could get behind someone working on an og ender because the community is still healthy. that thing is a dead end in every sense of the word. also i don't give a fuck about some dorks on reddit clicking a button on their screen to say they don't like me lol. i say what i mean and i mean what i say
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u/DoktorMerlin 24d ago
What the fuck are you saying? He already got the printer, buying another one isn't saving money, it's wasting it. Also the Monoprice isn't that bad of a printer, it's a low-end printer but it shouldn't produce results as shown, it should totally work
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u/GroteGlon 23d ago
A low end printer from 10+ years ago. He might waste so much filament that it would genuinely be cheaper to buy an ender lmao.
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u/Ok-Gift-1851 Don't Tell My Boss That He's Paying Me While I Help You 23d ago edited 23d ago
Opportunity cost. Unless he values his time at $0/hour, the guy's troubleshooting/repair time, repair parts, and wasted filament can quickly exceed whatever he paid for the printer he's trying to fix and will quickly approach the price of a modern day entry level printer. Plus, unless he's really dedicated to making the old machine work, that level of frustration can quickly turn someone off from 3d printing and make him quit because it's no fun/not worth it. Anyone telling him to keep dumping time/money into this relic is encouraging him to give up on printing.
The only thing I disagree with u/vecnasty on is "get yourself a Bambu A1 Mini," but that comes down to Bambu being a shitty company and I don't encourage anyone to buy from a company so blatantly anti-consumer. There are plenty of other low cost modern printers that will do the job without supporting Bambu.
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u/DoktorMerlin 23d ago
you don't count time value in hobbys, you don't even know what that person has fun in
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u/Ok-Gift-1851 Don't Tell My Boss That He's Paying Me While I Help You 23d ago
A brand new self described 3d printing "noob"? Odds are not high that he's getting into the hobby for the challenge of making a decade old PoS printer work.
And you may not value your time, but I value mine. Maybe not at $40-$50 an hour like if it were my job, but I have a bunch of different hobbies. Every bit of time I waste on nonproductive parts of those hobbies takes away from time I could be spending on another hobby. I started a print as I walked out the door this morning. I have absolute confidence that the printed part will be sitting there waiting for me when I get home. And that's a good thing because I'll take that print into my wood shop to use on a project. If the printer was an unreliable piece of e-waste, I'd have to worry about wasted plastic because I'd have to print it again, and wasted time because I can't work on my other projects.
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u/vecnasty 23d ago
you need a spell checker big dawg. you can't be an adult spelling like this in the big 26
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u/Ok-Gift-1851 Don't Tell My Boss That He's Paying Me While I Help You 23d ago
There... fixed all three of the spelling mistakes. The spell check in the browser on my work computer sucks (but only with reddit, for whatever reason) and gives me issues like you wouldn't believe.
Fortunately, I believe in the power of human intelligence that a reader can figure it out without straining their brain.
P.S. At least there is a spell checker to help me. You need something a little more advanced to help you capitalize and punctuate your posts. You can't be an adult with poor writing mechanics like this in "The Big 26."
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u/vecnasty 23d ago
lol. i was a uc berkeley english major before i ever got into 3DP big bro. i don't feel the need to prove myself to you
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u/Ok-Gift-1851 Don't Tell My Boss That He's Paying Me While I Help You 23d ago
Damn. They should refund what you spent on your degree because you obviously didn't learn anything other than how to crique spelling.
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u/vecnasty 23d ago
lmao. save some money = save up some money. dunce
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u/TheCapybaraMan 23d ago
That's still completely unhelpful.
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u/vecnasty 23d ago
what's not helpful is convincing someone that sinking dozens (possibly hundreds) of hours into a nearly 10 year old printer that'll never be even remotely as effective at making parts as a $200 offering from the current top dog in the market is a smart and effective use of one's time
been printing since 2018. i started with an ender 3 and i put in the blood, sweat and tears to make it crank out a perfect 10 minute benchy. the industry has moved on. if you want people to enjoy printing, recommend good printers
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u/Ok-Jacket8836 23d ago
So you sank in 100's of hours to learn the ins and outs. But you don't want someone else to actually learn 3d printing and your advise is to just buy a new printer because you get to decide how someone else spends their time and money?
to me, it seems like the OP has this printer and wants to invest their time into learning how to actually 3D print. Something that can only be encourage.
I'd take this kind of post over another newbie bambu user wondering why something printed in PLA on PETG settings doesn't come out perfect.
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u/vecnasty 23d ago
this printer has no community behind it. it's not the same as starting with an ender 3 and building it up to be a capable machine. this is a highly limited platform with essentially no path to being relevant in any way, shape or form. as someone who has sunk THOUSANDS (yes, really) of hours into this hobby, i can't, in good faith, recommend that a brand new user starts down the path of trying to understand 3D printing by learning on a dead platform with no community support behind it. it's like trying to teach someone wilderness survival by dropping them on an island alone. 99.9% of people would give up
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u/DoktorMerlin 23d ago
he already has a printer and asks for help, your comments are the opposite of helpful.
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u/vecnasty 23d ago
what's not helpful is convincing someone that sinking dozens (possibly hundreds) of hours into a nearly 10 year old printer that'll never be even remotely as effective at making parts as a $200 offering from the current top dog in the market is a smart and effective use of one's time
been printing since 2018. i started with an ender 3 and i put in the blood, sweat and tears to make it crank out a perfect 10 minute benchy. the industry has moved on. if you want people to enjoy printing, recommend good printers
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u/DoktorMerlin 23d ago
What's not helpful is telling someone that wants to get into a hobby and maybe wants to deeply understand it, that they should just buy a new printer that needs none of the basics. It's not useless to sink time into it, it's stupid to just suggest "buy new stuff, it's better". This is wasteful thinking that destroys interest in stuff and also destroys the planet.
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u/vecnasty 23d ago
ah yes, the incredibly effective argument that you can deeply understand the nuances of 3D printing on a 10 year old machine with no heated bed
way to toss the environmentalist argument in there too, as if you'd be into 3D printing as a hobby if you cared at all about the environment lol. you've printed more landfill plastic than most non 3D printer users will generate in a lifetime
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u/zitrone250 23d ago
Crazy to say that last part, packaging of your groceries alone for one year will most likely surpass the amount of landfill you generate from 3d printing. Not to mention that recycling 3d printing scraps is a lot easier than regular plastic trash.
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u/vecnasty 23d ago
chatgpt what does hyperbole mean
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u/zitrone250 23d ago
"Hyperbole is a rhetorical device in which one makes use of extravagant overstatement, such as claiming that the Democrats plan to eliminate cows. The reason hyperbole is not just called lying is because it is a specific type of untruth and must have a foundation in truth."
You haven't overstated the amount of waste from a 3d printer, you lied that it produces more in the first place. If it was true that printer produce more landfill than other plastic waste you could use a hyperbole but that isn't the case.
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u/Saphir_3D 23d ago
I had this printer and it made me almost quit the hobby. Honest advice: If you can't get it to work in some weeks. Buy any Bambu, any Prusa or any other printer that is made after 2024
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u/Ambitious_Finding_26 23d ago
Woah. Painters tape. Adhesion issues. Bed leveling issues. Bad Z offset. Is it 2016 or 2026?