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I have a Creality Ender 3 V2. I do a fairly good amount of printing with it, using only PLA.I have notice when I am printing between gaps or doing multiple objects at once, I get a lot of stringing. Some of the stringing is extremely thin, and others are thick like it was still printing through the gap. Are there any ways that I can fix this?

lil mikey
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Stringing can arise in at least four ways:

  • Retracting the filament by an insufficient length to prevent material from oozing out.

  • Not retracting the filament at all before some or all travel moves, because of bad options in the slicer.

  • Having filament that's so moisture-contaminated that boiling of water it's absorbed makes the filament bubble out of the nozzle even when it is properly retracted.

  • Moving the nozzle over already-printed material in ways that tends to "pull it up" and get it stuck to the nozzle, where it later gets deposited as semi-random strings. This mostly happens as a result of travel without retraction (see above) but the mechanism is different; it's not newly oozed material.

To solve it, ensure that all slicer options that cause retraction to be skipped are disabled. Particularly, under Cura or Cura-derived slicers, "limit support retractions" should be off, and "minimum extrusion distance window" should be set to 0 to ensure multiple retractions in rapid succession aren't skipped. And of course "enable retraction" should be on. Watch during a print to make sure the extruder is turning backwards before every travel move from one part to another.

If you still have stringing, tune the retraction distance with a retraction tower. If it doesn't seem to go away regardless of distance, your filament is probably excessively wet, and you should dry it. If you have a good drying setup, this is probably the first thing you should try, since it doesn't require any manual work just time and it's likely to be the core problem.

  • One more: travel moves that are too slow, so even with appropriate retraction settings the move takes long enough for some material to ooze, or what would have been minor stringing is now excessive stringing. – Joel Coehoorn Jul 05 '22 at 14:49