Lately I’ve been noticing inconsistent extrusion, especially in trying to get clean ironing. I’m testing by printing 4 flat squares 4 layers thick with the same settings and printing by object. The issue is one of the four squares will come out perfect but the others are either under or over extruded despite how they should all be identical.
I’ve done flow calibration which gets the average right but doesn’t fix the results bouncing up and down. I ran my filament through drying and ran the other calibrations on the printer, is there anything else that could cause identical prints to come out differently like this?
Hi, just a guess here, but is the good one always the same one of the four, and is it on the left side of the plate? If so, it may be excessive airflow from the auxiliary cooling fan on the right that is degrading the surface quality. Try printing one of the many diverters available for download.
If it’s not that, I don’t have any other ideas at the moment. Best wishes! Lets us know what you find.
Good guess! But no I already have an airflow diverter and a lot of the times the perfect one appeared second from the right. I’ve been seeing a lot of over extruded, under extruded, perfect, over extruded in that order.from left to right with a left to right printing order.
Also if I change the positions of the squares, their quality changes too, such as the square that was perfect in one print becomes underextruded if I move the positions and print order of the other squares, so I don’t think it’s location based.
Haven’t found a perfect solution yet, though it seems to be a common problem with top layer ironing. Best option so far looks to be trying to dial in the ironing/filament flow rate as close to the middle of the curve as I can get it so that the deviations aren’t that bad.
Ended up using the settings here with minor adjustments in flow rate and am seeing good results. The ironing still isn’t perfectly smooth but it’s better than no-ironing and also the results still look good consistently so far.
Okay I think my issue is resolved for real. I ended up raising my k factor even higher than calibration indicated before I started getting smooth top ironing regularly again. Manual Flow Dynamic Calibration indicated a k factor of about 0.023 but raising it instead to 0.03 gave me better results. I need to do more testing overall but so far it looks improved.