I’m pretty new to 3d printing as I just got an Ender 3 Max Neo for Christmas. I’ve been playing around with various filaments from Inland and Creality, but I’m having odd results with the Creality ones.
When using the Creality filaments, my prints get random holes, or outright fail, because of gaps when it’s extruding. The roll is not tangled and my extruder doesn’t appear to be slipping. I’ve tried adjusting speed, temperatures, flow, z offset, etc, but nothing is fixing the random gaps. The Inland filaments are working great and are very consistent. Any help is appreciated.
Is there a pattern to where the gaps are happening? Like are they always where the beginning of a layer starts printing or are they interspersed throughout layers? I recently had a similar problem with my K1 and some random filaments that were a few years old where the start/end points of my layers had holes, almost like the start of the extrusion was lagging behind the movement or the stopping of the extrusion was happening prematurely. I never really figured out the core problem because I just switched to vase mode because it worked nicely for the model I was printing. But I thought about playing with my retraction settings in case I was retracting too much or adjusting my nozzle temp in case these rolls just weren’t flowing when melted like they used to (but it sounds like you’ve tried that already). And I know it’s a bit cliche at this point but you might want to try drying your filament especially if you’re hearing pops from the nozzle when it’s printing.
It seems to be randomly within a layer rather than at the start and changes to retraction don’t seem to improve it. Oddly enough, I’m noticing on a more recent print that it seems to happen more frequently within supports (generated by Cura), which I think are printed faster.
I’ll try drying the filament. All of my Creality filament is from Amazon, where as the Inland stuff is all from my local Micro Center. I wonder if the filament from Amazon is just sitting around for a while, or in poor conditions.