It looks a bit melted. The blue is Polylite PLA and the green is Creality PLA. I printed them at different times using the 0.20mm standard profile with a concentric top layer pattern and 4 top shells.
It’s hard to tell from just that angle but if I were to guess, you are experiencing roughage due to the underlying layers being too thick.
Can you take a screen grab of the sliced model and use the side slider bar the cut away to the center of the model? This will reveal the underlying structure and we’ll be able to make an educated guess as to what’s going on.
I can when I get back to my computer. But I will say it printed great on my other P1S with Hatchbox PLA.
It’s important to be able to see the original model structure. Right from the get-go I can spot that you’re using vastly different patterns and wall thicknesses. What I can’t see is what the top layer thickness is.
The black on the left is clearly using concentric infill patterns and a wall thickness - if I am counting correctly - of 10 or 11. Whereas the one on the right is clearly using
Aligned rectilinear infill at what looks like 6 walls. Since the the walls are peaking through the print, I can only assume you have the top shell set to zero and that you also have the infill density set to 100%. Which would make sense if this is what I am guessing it is which looks like a key fob. You’d want something more solid.
But these are all guesses without a glimpse of the sliced model and/or slicers settings as I’ve shown below. Either way, you have two clear examples of very different fill patterns and top surfaces so it wouldn’t be a big leap to assume that you may have inadvertently activated a profile that you thought was one parameter when in fact it was another.
If I may suggest, ensure that you have top layers to set more than 3 and try to print again. This should produce a uniform top layer. By increasing the top layers, you also shield any interference from the infill pattern underneath which could lead to “roughness”.
I did use two different patterns, however wall thickness for both was 3, with 3 top shell layers. Concentric on the left, monotonic on the right.
Ok. So thanks for that last piece of information. When I experienced roughness on the surface of a PLA print, it was always remedied in one of two ways, both worked. You could just use the blunt force approach and during print, change the printer to quiet mode which reduces “all movement” to 50%, which is why I call it a blunt instruments.
A more precise method is to lower your Max flow rate in the filament profile. So I see you have Generic PLA and Polylite PLA. As you can see, there isn’t a whole lot of difference in the two but it is still a difference of 25% higher volume over generic. A quck and dirty test would be to just drop the value down to 10mm³/s and run a test print.
Generic usually will always be the most conservative settings.
So if it were me, I’d be double checking the calibration for the filament just to do a sanity check. My preference is to use Orca Slicers’ builtin but I wouldn’t use the default setting since you already know it wasn’t working at 12. So try these settings instead.
Default is as follows:
But I would use these for a quick test that will exaggerate the range. You will tearing and lots of artifacts higher up the test pattern very quickly. The Step is what determines how many layers will print at various volume.
I always double check to make sure the test model sliced correctly. You’ll see the pattern look like this.
And BTW: You can also use that same menu on your model and verify that the printer isn’t printing too fast in the problem areas. Maybe even do that first.
As far as your original question of “Why now a failure and not before” unfortunately there are to many variables to answer that unless you froze the conditions between each. That’s one reason you’ll see me use so many frequent screengrabs. I have it programed to my PrtScrn key so I can quickly save and archive what was on my screen when I experiment. Then when I save the filename I give it a descriptive name.
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