One of my tasks for this Christmas break is to figure out a problem I am having with my 3D printer. My youngest son and I sat down today to figure it out. Fortunately we succeeded and now have a better working device.
To troubleshoot the machine, we looked at any changes we had made to the printer. The first is a glass print bed and I highly recommend one as it makes a huge difference in print quality. I didn't think that could be the cause and so we looked at the only other change we made: changing the print nozzle. My son found a great deal on different sized print nozzles on Amazon and ordered them. For some reason he put one of the new nozzles on the printer after trying some of the different sizes. It turns out the new nozzle is not exactly the size advertised. It is supposed to be 0.4 mm in diameter but is slightly smaller. That makes it hard for the print material to bond to lower layers as it gets laid down. We were able to measure the nozzle diameter using a tool included with the printer. Replacing it with a correct-sized nozzle solved the problem and now our prints are working nicely. We measured all of the new nozzles and have identified the 0.4 mm nozzles that really are 0.4 mm.
Since discovering the problem, we have printed a number of small parts and all of them are turning out well. So if you have a 3D printer and suddenly the print material doesn't adhere to the lower layers of your print, the nozzle size could be the problem. Beware of low-cost 3D printer parts found on Amazon. They may not meet the tight tolerance requirements.
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