I come to you all in my time of need, as I have nowhere else to turn. I’ve been a 3D printer for about two years now. I have an Ender 5 Plus.
Up to this point, all of my prints were fine straight out of the box; no need to calibrate anything besides the bed.
I have just recently upgraded to an all-metal dual gear extruder. Before I did anything, I made sure to calibrate my extruder E-steps and my material flow. After that, all my calibrations said that my printer was ready to go.
Let me preface this with: I have been struggling with this issue for about a month. I looked up all the information I could but to no avail. I could not fix the walls of my print delaminating from one another.
As far as exterior appearances go the prints seem structurally “fine“. But the moment I try and give them a nice sanding to post-process them, the top layers begin to come off. Similarly, if I print a regular calibration cube or something like it all I need to do is put my fingernail in between the walls and the outermost layer will start to peel away from the body after all my test prints.
It feels like the material wants to bond together, but it never does. I have done everything from leveling my bed as close as possible to the nozzle, slowing down the print speed to about half of what I normally print at (mind you I’ve never had this problem even when printing at my original speed), even disable compensate for wall overlaps, and not to mention I’m printing pretty hot with my PLA at about 230 °C and even that doesn’t seem to work.
I could increase the material flow slightly, but then my walls would not be calibrated anymore; increasing the possibility for over-extrusion.
I figured this all out by printing a mask that would take 2 to 3 days to print. It took me a while to model all the miles, so you could imagine my dismay as I begin to process the mask for painting. When I was sanding, the layers kept lifting up. It’s not like I was putting excessive pressure or anything. I figured I could put somebody filler on the affected areas, but it quickly grew out of control.
As I’m sure some of you could relate, I bought a new roll of filament just for that project; to have it wasted.
During printing, I’ve noticed a type of “salmon skin” effect going on. It seemed like those areas suffered the worst delamination.
I’ve also noticed on some larger prints, that the consistency of the outermost perimeter is rather non-uniform at certain layers. What I mean by non-uniform is that it seems like the type of “banding” is going on.
If it’s any help, I am using Cura slicer.
Here are some links to the pictures of a print I just started to test if I fixed the issue, unfortunately, I have not.
As you can see in the pictures, it was delaminating. Unfortunately, it was just from some gentle pressure I applied with the edge of my fingernail.
I’m at my wit's end right now and have no other ideas of what to try to rectify this issue.
Edit: 6/23/2021- So after a test print, for some reason the perimeters I have not delaminated, at least yet, but I have found other oddities that I have not seen before. Do you have any suggestions?
I calibrated my E steps by following this video tutorial
I did it hot and with the nozzle on
