Some advice needed on ugliness in my prints.
This is a boat I printed for a nephew of mine. You’ll notice on the sides, there is a line which goes down the Z axis.
This happens because the hotend always “pauses” at those points. Might be when switching layers, or going to the next parameter. Not sure…
Any advise?
CURA
I printed this at 0.3mm
40mm’s print speed
4 parameters (1.6mm)
0,4mm nozzle
The layer separation and bottom ugliness is because of bad adhesion. I’m working on that…
Seems to be an issue with the retraction distance. But you also have a few other problems with your printer and/or filament. Which printer do you use and is it very cheap filament? And what kind of filament?
If I should place a bet I would say it’s PLA without (or with a very weak) cooling fan and a bowden setup with a not full metal hotend 
ABS? PLA? temperature? What filament brand?
Have heard that a shielded build chamber will reduce/remove the bad layer-adhesion you see at the front. the vertical lines is due to layer changing. You can configure it to not switch layer at the same place to get less obvious defects.
@Anton_Fosselius
A shielded (or encapsulated) build chamber only helps if you print i.e.ABS. If it’s PLA it’s definitely not a good idea!
This is a custom build - WeldingBot Rod printer.
It’s a bowden setup.
The full Travel of the printer is about 330mm (x) x 330mm (y) x 380mm (z)
What Retraction Settings do you think would be appropriate?
I’m currently using 4mm retraction, bowden tube as you can imagine is not the smallest of them all.
The hotend is a Hexagon (all metal)
The Filament I have to source from the UK (http://r.ebay.com/WvohXO) It’s simply not accessible in my country. Cyprus is a small island in the Mediterranean sea…
This is PLA printed at 205 Deg.
Cooling Fan is a Radial Fan…
Do you think I need to direct more airflow to the printed part?
More info on the printer:
That’s when it is switching layers. Is it a long pause? If it sits still at all it might be retracting, going up a layer then unretracting, and such a pause gives it time to ooze needlessly. If so, if there is a way for you to tell it to not retract for layer changes, I think it will improve. I don’t know Cura anymore so I can’t say what setting to use.
It’s a long pause, at least 500ms
I’ll check if there is any settings in CURA, otherwise I’ll switch back to Slic3r…
Another question first, I can see that you have a blob inside and missing material on the inside. So what is the starting and what is the point where it changes the z axis.
And by the way, 500ms is quite long. Try to make this time as short as possible. Otherwise you’ll see heat creeping effects. Especially with PLA and all metal hotends.
I fixed this on my Solidoodle 3 by using an option to randomize the starting point for each layer.
@Bryan_Riley
You can’t fix THIS issue here with this option. If you try you’ll basically just distribute the blob over the whole part instead of having them in a vertical row.
Posted the video.
Worth now than a thousand words 
Thanks for the video. Even though it’s difficult to see precisely how the path and where the changes in z direction are I can see some obvious things.
First of all, stop printing nice/funny things and start improving your air flow. Basically you’re cooling your print with the radial fan, which is a good idea. But it would be more efficient to cool the PLA directly below the nozzle. You could get some inspiration from @Eclsnowman . Especially his fan duct design for the Euthatios print is one of the smartest things I’ve seen so far. Maybe you can adapt this design somehow. He is also a very experienced guy when we talk about long bowden setups.
You should also improve the cooling of your heatsink. This will reduce the heat creep effect and as a side effect it will reduce your amount of “leaking” filament (blobs). It will also improve the general quality of your print. Maybe this is already enough so that you can keep the most of the settings for the moment. But the main problem is actually the hardware and not the software from my point of view. It doesn’t make sense to change millions of software settings when the hardware is not able to reproduce your settings in a reliable way.
What you could try is printing with a slightly lower temperature. Actually you are printing quite slow. Maybe you could go down to 195°.
Regarding retraction :
Just try to increase the retraction and re-retraction speed x2 by keeping the distance as a first try. I don’t have a lot experience with cura, but maybe there also an option for extra re-retraction distance. This way you could compensate the “lost” filament when it starts to print the next layer or on a new position.
@Sven_Eric_Nielsen , when you say the problem is the hardware, I guess you are referring to cooling right?
I’ll work on improving the cooling of both the filament directly as it exits the nozzle and duct to cool the heatsink as well.
Any other obvious problem you see when it comes to the mechanics?
@Panayiotis_Savva
This is the most obvious thing I know at the moment. But to be honest, I haven’t had the time to look deeper into the details of this particular printer design. I’ll try to look into the details this evening. Maybe I can find some things that are interesting to control again.
But don’t change too many things at the same time. Sometimes you don’t know which modification leads to the improvement and then you haven’t learned something new
And, even worse, sometimes you don’t see improvements because one thing made it better and the other modification made it worse again.
The easiest part is retraction speed, distance and temperature. While you play around with these parameters I would prepare new fan ducts and repeat the test with them.
