What exactly am I doing wrong..?
So I’ve been printing with a “hand me down” Ender 3. It was given to me by my BiL because I guess he felt like “upgrading” to a Bambu A1. When I received the printer, everything was stock except for the bed springs. BiL did end up upgrading those, but that’s it.
I just let it sit for a few months and just watched a ton of videos, read an ungodly amount of “guides”, and lurked around the various 3D printing/Ender 3 subs just to learn and take in as much as I possibly could.
About 5-6 months ago is when I started to actually jump in to printing and I very quickly noticed how annoying the original drivers are on the stock Creality board and made plans to eventually upgrade the board. Before I did that, I wanted to at least do my best to tweak and play around with printing in general - ya know, understand what it is I am doing before I make things more difficult to work with.
What I DID upgrade before I got the board was some better fans, switched bed springs for silicone spacers, and an all metal extruder(this was needed because the stock one actually broke). Was printing fairly decent with all this and felt I was starting to understand things!
It was at this point, about a month and a half ago, that I decided to jump in and upgrade the board to the BTT SLR Mini E3 v3, the LCD to the BTT TFT35, and also added a CR Touch. It took about a week to get everything MOSTLY dialed in, except I am having issues printing any sort of small features.
I’ve gone and ran just about every “test” there is:
Calibrated my e-steps
Retraction tower
Speed tower
Temp tower
Bridging and overhang torture tests
Hole test
Flow test
Support test…you get the idea..
When printing a Benchy the hull is great, but when it starts to get to the layers for the center cabin and the two holes in the front of the bow it starts the stringing issues.
What is it that I am missing or doing wrong to get great results for any “large” portions of my prints, but the “small” features are resulting in a TON of stringing?
Also, sorry for the novel. I wanted to make sure I gave enough information to give a decent idea of my situation…
ETA: forgot to mention that I thought wet filament was the issue. Tossed a roll of PLA into a food dehydrator over night and within an hour of taking it out I started another Benchy. Still resulted in the same stringing.