Looking specifically at the two-part black frame that contains the rest of the keyboard parts.
The lighting accentuates it and makes it look worse than it is, and it’s certainly not hard to live with, but it’d be nice to fix it.
Basic Ender 3 clone (Voxelab Aquila) with no real physical mods to speak of. PLA, .2mm layer height, 50 or 60mm/second. Happy to add any other details as requested.
If it’s new and getting worse, I would check for loose screws first. Especially if it happened out of nowhere. It never hurts to check belt tension. You don’t want too loose, but you also don’t want too tight so don’t just tighten them.
If this has always been present in your prints then congrats, you have ringing! You can decrease it by lowering acceleration/jerk/square corner velocity. If you want to get fancy, ringing can also be combatted with input shaping. Klipper makes this easier than Marlin, but it is possible to do on Marlin printers too.
Thanks. It seems like it’s fairly new, and the next print I did was similar in size and shape and with the same roll of PLA, but it has a less pronounced effect, though I can still feel it. I’ll check and see if any similar sized prints from farther back exhibit it, but I could very easily imagine something getting knocked a bit when I was last messing around with it. I had a roll of “Eco” filament that was giving me no end of trouble and eventually required a hot pull and new nozzle, and I changed out the plastic extruder for an aluminum one while I was doing stuff.
If you swapped hot ends I suggest printing a temp tower. When I went from a PTFE tube to a microswiss hot end on my i3 clone I remember having print one and change my extruder temp. Granted, thi was 5+ years ago…
the spacing between the ripples appears to be approximately the rotation distance of the wheels, is it only on that axis? ie. is it along the left/right side from the pics perspective or only the front/back?
i would check the wheels on the axis it appears for any damage or debris, and the wheel path.
My printer shares my home office with our bird (PLA printing only, and that not particularly often), and while I have an air cleaner that keeps it from being FULLY bird-dander central, dust is an issue for objects that sit. I’ll brush off the rail and belt particularly well for my next print.
If this is new, think you have a wheel adjusted too tight. When this happens, during rest it develops a small flat spot which translates to mechanical ringing in the print. If you let the machine sit for a while, then slowly move that axis, do you feel a bump where it was at rest? All of the axes should be smooth with no felt noise. If you feel noise, you’ll see it in prints.
If not, I would inspect your axis rails for any contaminants or damage, I used one of my printers so much I wore out the actual aluminum extrusion on the y axis and the bed was developing mechanical slop, which was actually difficult to find until I checked the bearing races.
Hmm, very possible, though I didn’t notice it the last time I was moving the print head by hand. I’ll let it sit and try again. The room also gets a bit dusty and the printer sits for a while between jobs, so I’ll make a point of cleaning the belt and rails before the next print.
Gonna have to upgrade one of these days to something enclosed and lower-maintenance, but I’m cheap with broad-ranging interests. I enjoy tinkering enough that, up to certain limits, working with less expensive “time-sink” hobby gear doesn’t bother me if it means I get to try something new.
Or rather, I’ve convinced myself that I do. :-)
