Yeah, you’ve got me grasping at straws here too.
How about a flat spot on an idler wheel on the carriage or something?
Like if you printed a whole bed of one layer, you’d see a repeating pattern, but it only shows up in places on the squares you’ve printed?
That is something I absolutely did screw up, and I have no way of reverting to factory, so whoa is me. Not sure why it only affects certain spots, but as a wheel turns 360, you are probably right.
When I bought the thing, and setup the X-gantry, and loaded up the extrusion head, belt, etc, I noticed that while I could push the gantry down (Z negative), I could not raise it an inch. So I naively thought, problem!
Ignoring the fact that I did not do much to adjust the wheels on the two Z-axis posts, I do remember absolutely messing with the adjustable wheel on the X carriage. I wrenched it all over the place. ONLY AFTER I did this did I learn these things are eccentric, and minute adjustment only is needed. So I had no way of returning the wheel to neutral or factory. I forgot how many turns clockwise and counter clockwise I did. So I absolutely could’ve knackers the X axis gantry wheel responsible for how smooth it rolls.
What can a person do about that? I think it rolls fine, but then again, I never really tried to undo my error, as I figure no matter what I do now, I am just going to hell.
I’ve found that if my printer sits for a while, it feels like flat spots develop, so before I print, I give each wheel a little random angle of twist, one way for one, different direction for another, on the x carriage, the bed, the gantry, so that all my flat spots don’t line up. If you can’t turn the wheels my hand with a polite amount of resistance, that’s a sign that they’re too tight. If they spin easily, too loose. The eccentric posts go from as close(tight) as they get to as loose through 180 degrees of rotation, so if you cannot make that resistance to hand turning reasonable in 180, you might have to reset wheel positions by loosening, nuts, etc, maybe as far as this, X Gantry Rework Section 2.1.2 featuring the Ender 3 - YouTube
You just had me looking at my wheels, and I found what I thought were flat spots, but were actually gunk, made up of dust, grease, etc especially on the top wheels, feeling like bumps in places as I slowly move the carriage back and forth.
Gonna keep my wheels clean now…
I think the only way for me to prove out a flat-wheel problem is to print a layer that exploits the entire X axis and see if thickness varies in the travel. If it is a wheel issue, there will be a regular pattern to thickness change, and I will know what to tackle.
I am pretty sure on this brand new machine this will not be the case, but I have nothing else to go on at this point.
I guess at least it will rule it out with certainty
It is odd. To me one side of each box is too close and the nozzle is not able to extrude enough filament. I don’t love the BL touch everybody totas it as a fix to all ‘leveling issues’ Tramming issues really. It needs to be fairly good to work properly. tech support at antlabs suggest less that the diameter of the nozzle to start with. That is often 0.4mm low to high. My bed from the factory was warped by far more than that.
I feel your frustrations. I do not want to mess with the tool I just want a reliable tool to use. That fact so many printers are all made by the same parent company that all use the same garbage cloned parts with the same fake conformity notices is just marketing idiocy. I plan on trying to avoid _____ 3d technology co ltd. in the future.
To me that issues looks like bed level. It however looks like bed level per box printed. That to me seems like something not correct at the head rather than the bed.
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I am not going to scream “I Fixed It!” but a few minutes ago, to cap off many hours of wasted plastic extrusion, I realized a few things. One, when I snap the filament off near the entrance to the extruder, I have no fricking clue what to do. A lot of Load/Unload commands till finally I just jammed it in there, and hit load, and it loaded.
I took to heart all the advice about levelling. So it is a truism: ABL is only useful if your bed is already level, it just compensates a little for being sloppy.
My removal of the glass, installation of the Wham Bam and thus wreckage of all things manually leveled was the true source of all these errors. I simply looked at what I did. I left the springs sem-compressed, but not evenly. So one corner was way out of whack, spring-wise, and hence tension on the bed wise. By equalling the spring pressure at all four corners, as best as possible, I then re-trained the ABL system. Re-jiggered a Z-offset. Learned that the filament was not being fed, then it was. Learned that the Z-offset I set was way bad. Re-jiggered that, and then, did a simple one-layer test print. And it worked almost perfect.
ALMOST PERFECT. So my next test should also be almost perfect. And then I will rejoice, knowing how little I know. Like what to do when the filament breaks. Also, this Marlin firmware, is so different from Creality firmware, it is so hard to know what to do menu wise. I think it is worthy of a notebook almost.
Anyway, thanks for the advice, it was indeed the Bed Level as being the source of all evil. Such a touch thing. And here I naively thought ABL solved all those problems, when in reality, it does no such thing. I really think a better bed levelling system is in order at this price point.
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Outstanding!
Very glad you are 99% fixed and climbing.
Quite a journey.
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Happy it worked out. True abl usually has a fixed bed or a bed the printer can adjust automatically. Adding it you now have two systems that need to work together.
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