Just a couple weeks ago I ran my best prints ever; they came out like polished stone.
Then I blew my control board. I have now replaced it (Ender 3 v2, old board: 4.2.2. New board: 4.2.7)
I’ve done several prints, and they all exhibit the same, severe problem. Severe enough to scrap the print.
The South side (front of the bed) and West side (to the right) are prefect.
The closer you get to the North East corner though, the worse things get. There are deep gouges that look like a glacier scraped over it.
Nothing like this happened before. The only change I can identify is the control board.
I have tuned retraction speed and distance as well as temperature.
One item to note: the cooling fan is to West or right of the print, so the area affected is pretty shielded from the fan. But again, it’s always been like this.
Photos below. Just a little dust on the SW view, it’s perfectly smooth.
It is your retraction settings, which need to be adjusted.
If you look at the stringing below, you can clearly see the print head moved from the stringing section to the one you described as glacier.
The print head moves over and looses filament do to slow/short retraction. When it arrives at the new location, it starts pushing filament and since the stringing emptied the hot end, it comes to late creating the glacier like structure.
To prove this, you can see the right top section, where no print is on the other side. So no stringing and no filament lost. That part is fine.
PS. would be easier to understand/see, when the print would be in print orientation and not 90° turned
First, thanks for responding, both of you. I appreciate the help!
I did retraction towers for distance and speed and arrived at 6.5mm @ 35mm/sec. I increased this to 7.5mm @ 40mm/sec (my extruder gets pretty noisy at higher speeds.) I’ve never had it higher than 7.5mm since I’ve had it.
The results were different, but not fine. Perhaps I had two problems, and have corrected one.
This time, on most sides I had short pits, not long gouges. These showed up some in earlier prints as well and aren’t associated with retraction.
I’m going to try changing the nozzle.
Final Report:
While inspecting the hot end, the z axis spontaneously jerked. The control pad was locked up. I restarted the printer, and it was dead as a hammer.
This is after replacing the control board just a few days back for the same reason. Now the screen is dark and I cannot flash the printer with new software, exactly like last time. (I worked on this for a week last time; I tried everything and nothing worked.)
My theory is that the power supply is the root cause of all my problems. The pits above could be caused by power fluctuations. Last time I suspected static electricity killed the controller board, this time I actually watched it happen, and I wasn’t the cause.
Replacing the power supply and control board would bring the cost of repairs up to pretty close to the cost of a new printer.
