I thought the Benchy was a small boat not a small horse butt. Anyway I am designing two custom CNC 4mm plates for the dual Z upgrade on my Ender 5. Stay tuned it will be fun.
We won't talk aboot my Benchy habit... This Ponicorn Monopoly piece for my wife (counterpart to Tiny Toothless) has been a problem model from git-go. First there was the problem of separating the model from the buildplate, which required an alternate approach to get the part off in one piece as the legs kept breaking off.
The first one I printed with "Support everywhere" turned out as a little blob of PLA that was pretty much inseparable from the supports. After that, I tried "Touching buildplate", which gave predictably stringy results on all the scallopy underhangs that went unsupported. I toyed with learning how to do tree supports BUTT...
...I had bigger problems. Much more important were these layer lines of poor adhesion in the belly area caused by poor extrusion. ALWAYS in the same area of the print. Repeated scrutiny of the slicing in Cura revealed no obvious defects in the model itself, so to determine if the problem was the printer or something else, I tried printing on my Diggro and that's when the poor extrusion turned into... unicorn butts.
It would just stop extruding, always in the same area of the print. Not the same exact line, but always this general area, even scaled at two different sizes.
At first I thought it was a nozzle clog; but releasing the extruder drive & feeding filament by hand... awesome extrusion with very little backpressure. Nozzle was okay.
It wasn't until I just sat there and watched the damned thing print that I was able to figure it out. Every once in a while the extruder drive would make this horrible buzzing sound, so I watched it feed filament. This area of the print is all very small amounts of extrusion, with repeated retracts over and over again. Eventually, the cogs in the extruder drive would "iron out" the filament, mangling it to the point that the rollers just couldn't get past. Loosening the tension on the extruder drive aboot 3 turns eliminated the problem and I was able to get the above mostly successful print. I'm guessing the CR6-SE extruder drive was eventually able to get past the mangled spots, but still underextrusion in that area of the print.
In retrospect, that is probably because using cheap filament included with the CR-06SE; it seems much softer than the filament I've been using. But just goes to show... there's always something new to learn with these things.
mnem