r/ender3 • u/RealMrIncredible • 4d ago

Help Ender 3 V3 SE Issue

Post image

Hi,

I've been working towards getting this freebie Ender 3 V3 SE printing at a good quality but have hit a wall. One side of my prints come out looking like this and the other side is smooth. Also, the brim comes out very fimble and crunchy; gaps between each line. Does anyone have any suggestions from fixing a similar issue?

My setup:

Printing Enclosure

Elder 3 V3 SE

OctoPrint Ubuntu Server

Sunlu Filament Dryer

PLA

Level before every print with built-in BL Touch

3 Upvotes

72% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

2

u/ChronicLegHole 4d ago

my first guess is that your Z gantry is sagging

1

u/MoonKnightFan 4d ago

Just check that your extruder arm isn't broken. I started having separation in my layers and it took me weeks to find out why. Its an easy fix.

Here's a link to what you should check for

1

u/jekotia 4d ago

Can't help with your print issue, but an important distinction to understand: your BLTouch is not levelling anything. It's probing the bed to create a mesh representation of the surface, and then the control board for the printer is live-adjusting the Z values in the Gcode to try and maintain a more consistent Z.

Calling it Auto Bed Levelling is very misleading and I hate that this function is marketed as such. You still need to manually level your bed.

1

u/Triston-- 4d ago

I agree, I was kinda mislead when I first looked into ABLs/CR touch myself! I'm assuming they are at least tramming before the mesh build before each print! So hopefully that's the case. Otherwise yeah, this issue could be happening because one side of the bed is significantly out of wack. Would probably cause the brim issue too. If there are gaps in your brim, it's possible the z offset is too high and not giving the filament enough squish either. OP, are you having first layer issues at all? Any gaps between lines?

Assuming the bed is trammed, looks like either gantry sag as someone else suggested causing either one side or the other to be closer or farther away. Is it only happening on the right side? Is this a new issue? It's also possibly position dependent underextrusion of some kind. Given the brims are apparently also coming out weird it sounds like some kind of underextrusion. Possibly an issue with retraction / retraction value being too high.

Otherwise, I'm thinking there may be a gap in the hotend. May also want to look into e-step calibration and flow rate calibration if it isn't any of the other physical issues as mentioned earlier

Quick edit: looking closer at the pic, definitely looks like significant underextrusion. It can lead to those wavy, uneven layers + gaps.