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I bought my Anet A8 less than 2 weeks ago. The setup went fine. In the first 1 week, I printed a lot, and the quality was really good. Now, the quality of prints is really bad. The infill is terrible, like little individual sticks and there are strands of PLA attached to the object(see picture). My Cura settings are:

  • layer height: 0.15 mm
  • infill: 70 %
  • infill pattern: grid
  • printing temperature: 205 °C
  • bed temperature: 55 °C
  • print speed:35 mm/s (I reduced it from 60 to 35 thinking it might fix the issue, but no luck)

Any help would greatly be appreciated.

After cutting a lot of the strands off

0scar
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tt123
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  • Welcome to 3D Printing! Did you change filament, brand or color? If you did, go back to a known good filament and try your print again to see if it comes out right. Poor filament quality can cause issues. Even color variance within the same brand can give different results. – Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 Sep 30 '18 at 13:35
  • No, it's the same filament. – tt123 Oct 01 '18 at 11:33

1 Answers1

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This effect you see is called stringing. Stringing can be reduced by changing any or a combination of the following slicer settings:

  • lowering hot-end temperature, (less heat means less heat input so less runny filament oozing out),
  • increasing travel speed, (increase in travel speed reduces the time to move to another point implying less filament oozing),
  • retraction, (increased filament retraction reduces the pressure build-up in the hot-end decreasing the filament oozing)
  • increasing coasting length (coasting means that you stop extruding filament prior to a move when the head is still printing, this is explained by the pressure build-up in the hot-end; ideally you set the coasting length as such that all the material that is pressed out as a result of the pressure build-up is extruded just before the head moves/travels to another location),
  • print part cooling, (see this topic)

In order to find the correct settings you will need to print so called calibration test prints. There are a lot to find on Thingiverse, just search for "stringing".

Your print temperature may be a bit high, but some PLA filament brands require that, I don't know if that is the case with your filament, but you could start try lowering that by 5 °C a time.

0scar
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  • I think the temperature's the problem. I increased it by 10 degrees thinking it might help prints(not sure why). I'll try again. Thanks a lot! – tt123 Oct 01 '18 at 11:35
  • Decreasing the temperature and increasing the print speed helped cut down the stringing. Thanks a lot! – tt123 Oct 02 '18 at 14:59