Bad print about mid way through

This is part of a project I am working on for a mining loading pocket that I designed last year. This is the hopper support tower. I am printing all the parts at 1:20 scale or 5% scale in Cura.

This print took over 36 hours on an Ender 3 S1 Plus (also printed with another section of the support steel.) . It was all going great with no issue then at some point past halfway thru it created a bunch of layers that seemed to off on each leg. 2 of the legs actually snapped off at that point. Then after a few bad layers it straightened out and the rest of the print was good.

I am hoping someone may have some insight as to what may have happened.

I can glue the legs to repair them but hoping for feedback to correct any issues before I print the shaft steel beams.


It looks like it could be a filament feed issue. That at least is the simplest of the plethora of possibilities. Check the filament is moving freely. And run the extruder to roughly that height and see if it is possible it is hanging up on something. Animals and kids can be culprits too.

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Thanks @kitedemon
Now that you mention that I did get the odd “out of filament” error when it really wasn’t and I just ignored it. I’ll check as you said and see what happens.

I couldn’t find anything obvious at the point where the print started to have issues. All wheels were normal. I did notice that the filament sensor was a bit off center of the bed and moved it more to the center. Not sure if that would cause the issue.

I now have another section running on the printer.

I measured the flawed print “Z” dimension to where the issue started and found it was at 110mm to 130mm (my print volume is 300x300x300). I calculated the time that this new print would take to get to that 110mm point (1143 layers/32.5 hours=35.2 layers per hour. So with a .2 layer height it will reach the 110mm height at layer 550. Then 550/35.2 = approx. 15 1/2 hours. So I set my watch to alarm at that time and will monitor it for a while and see what happens.

It could be as simple as a kink in the filament or a slight filament snag. Hard to say it doesn’t need to be a flaw with the printer. Just to add complexity. Good luck. Hopefully it resolves itself

also, a thin spot in the filament too, if you get 2 feet of filament that’s undersized it’ll do weird stuff that self corrects

@Glenn That could be very possible, this roll was a free Christmas gift from Creality in their Christmas contest. I buy all of my filament from 3D Printing Canada and never saw this issue before. I just noticed it is doing it again but at a different “Z” location. So you may be 100% correct.

That would also explain the occasional out of filament error I was getting as well.

Many thanks.

Many thanks to @Glenn the problem was definitely the crappy filament from Creality. Now we know why they were giving it away.

I used a new spool from 3D Printing Canada and the reprint came out perfect.

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ahh glad you got to the bottom of it. these kinds of problems sometimes remain a mystery,