I've been printing for a few months now and most of my prints end up pretty fine, but recently this started happening:
I print on a Creality CR-10 Smart Pro with 1.75 mm PLA and a 0.4 mm nozzle at 200 °C nozzle temperature and 60 °C heatbed temperature. There's major stringing, and the supports and small printed structures like the fingers have big gaps, so technically that would mean it's both over- and underextruding? I tried adjusting the Z-axis. My print bed is probably bent down in the middle as per the sheet of paper leveling and I'm wondering if the x-axis isn't bent upwards, too. Nonetheless, I could still manage to print out some nice big parts until a few days ago and the print bed and x-axis being potentially bent is something I've noticed a while ago already.
I tested the drive gear (sometimes it ticks mid-print, is that a sign that something's off?), and with manual in and out commands, the measured distance is equal to the requested distance, so that one doesn't seem to be broken. I cleaned my hot end, unscrewed everything, scrubbed off some molten PLA, changed the nozzle, and tightened the hot end back together with the relevant parts heated up to 260 °C. I tried cold-pulls, around 8 of them, heating up to 200 °C and pulling at 90 °C, using the same as usual white Creality PLA filament. I can't see any debris and the shape of the thing I pull out seems the same as what others find. Another 2 things that changed are a firmware update and an OrcaSlicer update (I sadly can't roll back to the old version to test if that's related).
At this point I honestly don't mind the stringing, it's just the holes that I want to fix. I can remove material in post-process, but it's a real pain to add some and the prints are really weak, too. One of the fingers just broke off.
Is there any quick way for me to send my OrcaSlicer printer, filament, and process settings so you can better help me with the issue? If there's a chance I might have missed something during one of my attempted solutions, what are typical things I could've missed?
I'm going to try a filament dryer.
So I used the Sunlu FilaDryer S2 for around 12h on 55°C and it's not really better. Anyone got an idea?