Hi! Looking for some advice here from friendly local experts.
I’ve printed this with Elegoo Neptune 3 Pro, 0.4 nozzle, Elegoo PETG filament, no enclosure. Using PrusaSlicer.
This print is basically all walls - the hex grid is thin. It’s 2mm thick and each segment is 1.5mm wide. I set 3 layers for walls in slicer. It was printed vertically, just as seen on picture.
The solid part of the print (back wall) came out just fine, but the hex grid part came… dirty. On the picture, there are a few hex segments that just broke off during the print at the base of vertical segments. And the rest of them have small loops of filament that stick outside of the intended surface, to the sides.
My suspicion is the print temperature is too low. I’m printing at 230, which is the low end of 230-260 range of the filament. But in my previous tests I noticed stringing that starts around 240, so I did a few other prints that were just fine at 230, and I made it my default temp for this spool.
Or is it just too fine detail for my printer with PETG? Or something else that I am missing?
That’s a tough one. Those small points hanging ledges pose a lot of problems for printers and petg is not a forgiving filament type.
As others have said, petg can be a harder filament to print. Even dry it tends to be more viscous leading to oozing, stringing. I’m not convinced that’s the problem but it could be part of it as build up from stinging or over extrusion can cause collisions leading to something like this.
The damage looks like it’s happening on one side. That hints at either a cooling problem or some movement or seam placement problem.
Looking at pictures of your printer it looks like it has too fans so I suspect that side had direct cooling and the openness means it’s probably not getting a wall that would affect it.
Related to movement, speed/acceleration could be an issue. You might have heard scratching while printing in this area. If so slight warping during cooling or from over extrusion could lead the nuzzle colliding. On a more solid print you could probably get away with ignoring it as it wouldn’t affect the print but with such small parts small impacts over time will lead to knocking parts off or distorting them. Try slowing down the print. Most of the print here is delecate but you can do that in modifiers if you want other parts of the print to be fast.
Not sure how much that adds or helps but good luck.