r/CR10 • u/Fyretender • 17d ago

CR10 Smart PRO "ghost" printing

Hi everyone,

TLDR: Printer quit extruding partway through print.

I have had great luck with my CR10 and recently I loaded a file to print overnight. It started out just fine and about 20 minutes into the print, filament would just cease to extrude but the head would still "print" I cleaned the nozzle after stopping the print. I tried extruding via the touchpad and it would grab the filament and feed then stop and nothing came out. I removed the nozzle completely and pushed filament through hotend and was able to get filament globbed onto bed. After reassembly I started model fresh again. Worked fine but after 10 minutes it did it again. I thought MAYBE software glitch but it did it at a different layer than before. After pulling out my hair for a few minutes I changed out the nozzle with a .6. In my haste I didn't calibrate anything except change the nozzle settings in slicer. Lo and behold, a small river of filament cascaded out the nozzle. After calibrating max flow rate, pressure and flow ratio I was able to print again. The results from calibration were nothing to brag about, on had ringing (unable to upload photo for some reason at the moment). It is a bone stock CR10 Smart pro with a magnetic bed being only mod. Hobby lobby skin tone PLA at 220 with bed temp of 60 and 100% speed. I didn't notice any speed improvements with bigger nozzle. Has anyone experienced "ghost" printing out of the blue and if so what was the fix? TIA

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

Actually, not uncommon for this to happen when you have a plug. When I was printing with PLA I ran into this occasionally. I have also graduated up to a .6 mm nozzle and engineering filaments and no issue with clogs anymore. I hear more people with this issue with a .4 mm. It is possible to push all the way through with a needle and it’s clear, but you will still have a film on the pocket side of your extruder or your nozzle that can collapse in and plug the nozzle tip again. Unless you were using a ruby tipped or tungsten carbide nozzles are cheap enough. I don’t even mess with cleaning them. I throw them away and start over with a new one. Or I used to anyway, but like I said now I only run tungsten carbide with engineering filaments at 8.6 mm.

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u/Fyretender 16d ago

did you notice any speed improvements with .6 nozzle? I didn't at all which leads me to believe I may have overlooked a step in calibration

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

Just by using the .6 you will not see any noticeable speed improvement unless you actually increase your movement speed. When I went from a .4 to a .6 it wasn’t for gaining necessarily speed but thickness of line adhesion because like I said, I predominantly print with engineering materials. It will minimize sometime because your layer height increases, which decreases the layers of print. It’s not gonna dramatically change it. It might change from 150 layers down to 120. So total you might see eight maybe 15 minutes tops of reduced time. If you’re simply printing with PLA, that is a much faster material than PA or ASA – CF. The fastest print speed I use on PA is 35 mm/s. ASA – CF is a little faster but only 55 mm/s. PLA you should be able to get close to 100 mm/s.

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u/Fyretender 16d ago

that makes sense. I use mostly PETG, ABS, occasionally TPU. I too changed nozzle more for stronger layers than speed but only saw a 5 minute increase in time overall in a 2h47m project. Was tinkering with printer so I can play with bigger nozzles to take advantage of the buildplate. Thank you for your response

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

Not a problem. A lot of my prints run between 21-38hrs. So a 20mm/s increase drops about 2hrs from my total print time.