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I had a hard time printing some parts as the brim was printed very well contrary to the first layer, wall, and especially infill. I noticed that filament lines were too thin when printing walls, infill, and the first layer. So the first layer was not sticking to each other.

I suspected that the slicer was the first to investigate, so I printed a model which I already printed before from SD Card and the newly printed part has the exact problems.

Suspecting that filament thread gets cooled very soon so we tried:

  1. Printing with more Nozzle Temp (225 °C).
    Result: Walls adhered better but still not strong in addition to weak infill.
  2. Then turned on Fan Automatic Control
    Result: more nice walls with still weak infill.

Setup:

  • Creality CR-10 Smart 3D Printer
  • Cura Slicer
  • Material eSUN PLA+ White
  • Nozzle 0.4 mm
  • 10 % Infill
  • 30 % infill overlap percentage
  • 0.32 mm infill layer thickness.

Closeup view of a printed model with lots of filament 'threads'

Small printed model with layer lines not adhering

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  • $\begingroup$ can you tell us the following information via an edit: Print material, nozzle diameter and line width? You have 0.32 mm layer height, which is very tall and only advisable with nozzles that are 0.45 mm or larger. It is common to print wider than the nozzle diameter and at max 3/4th the height. $\endgroup$
    – Trish
    Jan 13, 2022 at 14:26
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    $\begingroup$ Welcome to 3DPrinting.SE. Is this a stock CR-10? You clearly have under extrusion. Please check your extruder. What filament do you use? Please update the question by edit. $\endgroup$
    – 0scar ♦
    Jan 13, 2022 at 23:17
  • $\begingroup$ If you buy a CR-10 the first thing you should do is replace the extruder for a microswiss direct-drive system. The stock extruders are absolute garbage and will cause you a lot of problems like this. It will also remove 1 variable and narrow down the source of future problems. $\endgroup$
    – AzulShiva
    Jan 16, 2022 at 9:28
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    $\begingroup$ @AzulShiva no, the term "Layer thickness" is, in industry, used for the height of a layer, not the line width $\endgroup$
    – Trish
    Jan 16, 2022 at 10:12
  • $\begingroup$ @Trish Thank you for elaborating, but he certainly isn't using a layer height of 0.32mm, that is not possible. He said "INFILL layer thickness" along with mentioning other infill settings so I assume he meant the infill line distance setting from the Cura slicer and perhaps making a typo in the process. $\endgroup$
    – AzulShiva
    Jan 16, 2022 at 10:21

1 Answer 1

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To solve this problem, I tweaked the following:

  1. Infill Pattern: Some patterns tend to be more solid than others, going back to Grid instead of Cubic ensuring that there is a solid base for infill to avoid layer shift in infill as Cubic infill is printed in a slanted angle.

  2. Infill layer height: It seems that the CR-10 Smart is unable to print 0.32 mm infill layer height.

  3. Lowering infill speed: going from 75 mm/sec to 50 mm/sec as 75 mm/sec infill speed was too much for the extruder as it was unable to keep up with the speed so you will start to notice under-extrusion on the inside of your part, This under-extrusion will tend to create weak, stringy infill since the nozzle is not able to extrude as much plastic as the software would like.

Attached below the difference between 0.16 mm infill layer height on the right, the model is sturdy and strong. 0.32 mm infill layer height on the left, the model is weak and stringy.

Two 3D printed models with 0.16 mm infill vs 0.32 mm infill

On my try to print a large scale print the same problem occurred, very weak infill, which drove me crazy !

Addressing the real problem "Under-Extrusion" .. testing extruder I noticed that there is a crack on the feeder box

Cracked Feeder

In my opinion it's a bad decision to go for plastic for the feeder, their design uses the lever to shift the plastic box which has the idler pulley (fixed on it) to relieve the pressure on filament.

CR10Smart feeder design inside of feeder

The crack on feeder weakened the grip on filament, causing slippage making the filament to be extruded too thin, which made the filament too weak to stick to each other.

Changing extruder to aluminium kit feeder with tight grip on filament ensured that filament is pushed correctly without slipping and also stopped stringing while nozzle is heating.

Print on left after applying the fix. before&after

Hopes this save someone's the trouble.

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