In the past month or so I have noticed my prints looking worse and worse, especially the first layer. It’s been spitting out far too much plastic. Upon diagnosing and running calibrations, I’ve found that I have to set my flow ratio down to 0.8 for it actually look and be good.
I have several other printers and have never seen a value this low before. The auto flow calibration does not work at all, even running it with many different filaments across the board.
I have official bambu filament, PLA, PETG, third party filament, PLA, PETG, and they all need to run at 0.8 to print well. I am using a 0.4 hardened steel nozzle, official Bambu nozzle.
I opened it up today, cleaned it up, removed any little bits that have built up, but upon doing another test print I have the same results. It seems like it’s more of a sensor issue now than anything else.
I’m happy to upload anything that would be useful. I’m running out of ideas though and would greatly appreciate any advice.
is it only on first layer or throughout the entire print?
Maybe you can share a 3mf with your print settings, so we can try them too? That would reveal if the printer is broken or some slicer setting is the culprit.
I have been switching the hot ends and thought that could be it, but I have checked before running a few tests and it’s been correct. Unless somehow internally it’s thinking it’s at a different nozzle size than what it’s showing me…
The first layer is by far the most visibly obvious, as the layer is rough and looks awful. The prints normally finish, but they are not good looking and don’t fit together in parts that require movement.
I’ll get a 3mf together and upload it shortly, along with some photos showing what I mean specifically. Thanks!
Incorrect nozzle diameter does not affect flow. You can print Gcode on the wrong nozzle size and it will come out very close to correct with a noticeable degradation in details, but flow numbers will work no matter the nozzle size. Something else is very wrong.
@ATCraiger Have you checked for signs of overheated plastic? This high of a number is very wrong even on the wettest of wood PLA. It sounds like plastic might be foaming from over heating.