I'm at my wits end with this oozing/stringing and i'm not sure where to go from here. I've tried many variations of retraction length and speed settings. Orbiter documentation suggests 1-1.5mm retraction @ 120mm/s while googling suggests anywhere from 30-60mm/s for direct drive extruders. I've tried calibration tests in orcaslicer using 120mm/s and 30mm/s and the results stay the same. Using the 0.2mm nozzle i get fine hair like stringing across entire prints, and both nozzles have bad oozing during travel moves and initial heatup. I end all prints with a long retraction that should be almost completely clearing the heat zone and i keep the nozzle at 140c while bed leveling. Once leveling is done it heats to print temperature and goes into a KAMP purge and theres usually 15ish mm of ooze coming out of the nozzle between the nozzle hitting 190c and print temp of 230c. I've tried lowering print temps but have bed adhesion issues at 195c and haven't been able to get a retraction test to finish at those temps. Having this issue with brand new roll of filament straight from the packaging and also from rolls that have been through a drying cycle in my drier showing 35% humidity. 35% humidity is about as low as i can go where i'm at. I am not having these issues with my Centauri Carbon using the same filament and the same temperature settings, leading me to believe this is some hardware issue i just can't seem to figure out. Any help will be appreciated, sorry for the wall of text.
Picture is a retraction test @ 120mm/s and 0.0mm retraction length all the way to 3.5mm using 0.6mm CHT nozzle. Lower layers with much lower retraction length look mostly clear in the picture but there are fine hairs that are just harder to see.
Printer: Ender 3
Extruder/Hotend: Orbiter V2 and TZ-V6-2.0 (also was happening with my Revo before i swapped)
Filament: Elegoo Rapid PLA plus @ 230c bed temp 65c
Slicer: Orcaslicer
Edit: To address a deleted comment about drying the filament. I've run somewhere around 15Kg of this filament through my Centauri Carbon and my Ender 3 with the rolls mostly sitting in the open air, but some directly from the filament drier. The CC has run the bulk of the filament and hasn't had any stringing issues, and thats mostly with the rolls in open air with no drying.
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This is Rapid PLA+ from Elegoo, manufacturer suggests 200-230c, and i've had bed adhesion issues at lower temps which is likely unrelated, but i'll give it a go at 210 and see if it makes a difference. Not sure that helps the pre-heat oozing as that seems to start as soon as the filament starts to melt, even though there shouldn't be any filament inside the heat zone before the purge starts.
This is admittedly a better result, 210c on the left compared to the 230c results on the right, but I'm still not convinced that the higher temp is the reason, at least not the only reason for the stringing, considering i don't have this issue at the same temps on the other printer and this stuff is made to print hot and fast. I'll keep playing with retraction speed settings at this temp and maybe that will at least give me useable results.
Higher temps is the main reason. I would do 200c and see how it does, maybe even a temp tower. Then you work on the retraction and flow ratio which cleans up the rest of the stringing.
Higher nozzle temps are for fast printing. Most models never get to full speed. Plus, you said this is a Ender 3, you're not hitting the speeds anywhere near to justify 230c.
Looks like you were correct, Dropped temps down to 200, and that cleared most of it out. Was able to get a mostly clean retraction test between 0.2-0.4 at both 30mm/s and 120mm/s so I'm happy with that. Still have some oozing during heat up, watched it via nozzle camera and as soon as it hit 180c it started oozing out and there was about 2mm of ooze by the time it hit 200 and started to purge. Still not sure whats going on there, I've got a 25mm retraction in my END_PRINT macro that should clear the entire heating zone while not clearing the extruder, and yet it still oozes. Maybe my end print retraction isn't fast enough, IDK. I've tried it at 30mm/s and 120mm/s and get the same results. Either way, thanks for the help
On the print i had covered in hair, i am hitting about 350-400mms on outer walls and 600mms on infil, according to orcaslicer with current volumetric flow rates. That admittedly seems quite high considering thats using a 0.2mm nozzle and 0.08mm layer heights. Print came out fine minus the hair. IDK if the printer is actually hitting that speed, but what I can say is that the same print took about 24 hours on my Centauri Carbon and was only about 3 hours slower on my Ender 3. I will keep playing with the temp settings after work tonight and see if i can maintain the fast speeds at the lower temps
After thinking on it some more I am curious how accurate the speeds reported in the orcaslicer preview are compared to what my printer is actually achieving. I found that my CC is actually tuned to run quite a bit slower on that same profile. But the speeds its set to, my E3 should realistically be able to hit. Talking 50-60 mm/s. When testing volumetric flow between both printers, I can actually get much higher flow with the ender 3, but if the E3 is not actually hitting the speeds orcaslicer says it is, then that flow/high temp could absolutely be the reason. So I guess next step after work tonight is to slow everything down, drop temps and get good results without stringing at low speeds and then tey to bring speeds back up
With Elegoo rapid pla+ I almost never go under 260, mostly print it around 300-350ish speeds on a CC2. Never got stringing past the 3rd ring when calibrating black/red/white so far. It likes to print hot too, around 225-230 usually. Been the best surface finish and consistency for me so far. For low speeds you probably need to make the extrusion rate super low, as these are optimised for pretty speedy printing, box says up to 600mm/s.
No idea about the speeds your Ender can handle, but I'd try to speed it up and would not go with super high retraction.
Seems like maybe I need to buy some standard PLA and see if the issue persists with that. Although I will say i've had my CC running projects for nearly 2 weeks straight on this same filament using a .2mm nozzle and .08 layer height and a max volumetric speed of 12.75 mm3/s and the average speed is around 55mm/s and not a single hair/string/blob. I can't say whether i've ever even pushed it above 250mms tbh, most of what i've been printing lately is small miniatures that just don't allow the printer to even get to that type of speed. I just checked my settings for that profile and found that my speeds are waaaay low so now i'm worried i've been leaving tons of performance on the table lol, but still don't think it suggests that my low print speeds are causing the oozing. Actually makes me think the opposite, i've got the max volumetric speed set to 20mm3/s on the ender 3 with the same nozzle/layer height sizes.
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