My printer was hitherto generating excellent output. Suddenly it’s creating insanely bad output where layers are clearly visible, thus wasting much time and material. I’m certain this phenomenon shown in the image below has a specific term in the 3D universe.
If that is supposed to be a smooth sided object these are not just layer lines but something else. Is everything tight? If the hot end has loosened it might create ripples like that. Is the Z rods straight?
Hi @lothian welcome to the forum, Glad you found us. We love issues like this.
From what I can see the under or over extrusion is uniform across the layer, If its sunkin on the X axis its also Sunkin on the Y axis. This would tend to make me belive its not something loose per say or at least not immediately.
If the only thing that has changed is your nozzle did you change the size of it or is it the same size as before? This does look a little worse than just layer lines. Looks like over extrusion on random layers and under on others. You had said you updated the e-steps, do you remember what the change was? if it was more than 5% either way then I would be looking at extruder rather than hot end. Do you mind if I ask was there a reason you changed the nozzle or just part of regular maintaince?