Spool3D News

Under-extrusion happens when your 3D printer deposits less plastic than the slicer expects. The result may be obvious: missing lines, gaps between walls, weak infill, or entire sections that barely print. Other times, the print looks reasonably good until you hold it up to the light or discover how easily it breaks. The difficult part is that under-extrusion is a symptom, not a single problem. A partially clogged nozzle can cause it. So can a slipping extruder, filament that is difficult to pul …

A layer shift can ruin an otherwise perfect print in a fraction of a second. The printer may run normally for hours, make one bad movement, and then continue printing every remaining layer several millimetres away from where it belongs. That sudden offset is the clue. A true layer shift usually means the printer lost its expected X or Y position. The controller still thinks the toolhead or bed is where it should be, but the physical motion system slipped, skipped steps, hit something, or failed …

Stringing is one of those 3D printing problems that gets reduced to a single piece of advice: “Increase retraction.” Sometimes that works. Sometimes it makes almost no difference, because retraction was not the real problem in the first place. Stringing happens when molten filament continues to ooze from the nozzle while the toolhead is travelling across an open area. The printer is no longer supposed to be extruding, but a fine strand of plastic gets pulled between two parts of the …

Your first layer can look perfect and the print can still warp twenty, fifty or two hundred layers later. That catches people off guard because first-layer adhesion gets blamed for almost every lifted corner. If the part was flat and firmly attached when the print started, it is tempting to assume the bed surface did its job and something mysterious happened later. Usually, nothing mysterious happened. The plastic simply cooled, contracted and pulled hard enough on the lower layers to overcome …

A printer can run perfectly for the first ten, twenty or forty minutes of a job and then suddenly start clicking, under-extruding or stop feeding filament altogether. When that happens, the nozzle usually gets blamed first. Sometimes the nozzle really is clogged. But on an enclosed printer, especially when printing PLA or PETG, there is another failure mode worth understanding: heat creep. Heat creep happens when heat travels farther up the filament path than it should. Filament starts to softe …