I make mistakes too.

You know some people look up to me as if I know everything but man is that the opposite of reality.

I was struggling so hard with Klipper on the MK3s. I was getting really good prints at faster speeds but I was struggling with retractions.

Changed 400 billion settings and then ended up swapping the hotend twice!!! Still didn’t fix it. I was at my wits end.

I asked people and nobody had any idea. Shared my config and nobody had an answer.

Jumped back and forth between maybe it’s a hardware issue or maybe it’s a software issue or maybe it just can’t do this so let’s mess with slicer again. Nothing worked. 14 benchies all with missing chunks in the same spot before the roof and in the smoke stack.

I went from printing a 1 hour 0.1mm layer height benchy that failed to a reasonable speed 0.2mm benchy that failed. They all looked good minus the missing layers.

It wasn’t till I grabbed the actual gcode file and read it line for line.

I’m literally a moron.

I realized then that I did such a silly but sneaky mistake. In order to have before and after prints I literally cloned my profile and edited only the start and end gcode. What I didn’t check was my layer change gcode.

Every profile and start gcode I saw for klipper showed absolute extrusion and absolute movement. I set everything correctly for just that BUT the layer change gcode had a G1 E0 ; to reset the extrusion every layer. This is fine for consistent moves but when you get to short moves around the model it’s resetting the extrusion and absolute is missing chunks and just won’t extrude.

Basically in my haste to make a quick profile for comparison sake I gave myself hours of head pounding into the wall and tons of useless models.

Since the change everything has been good and I’ve been able to print faster with nearly the same result. I have one issue and that’s the Y axis doesn’t want to play as nice at this pace and I get slightly more ghosting than stock at my normal slower speeds.

This could be that I still have the spool on the top of the frame because at these speeds the frame starts rocking. I could test it against a bear frame version but that would mean swapping out one of my babies and I’m a little sad to try it.

So yes. I make boneheaded mistakes that set me back a day or more at times and I’m also nervous to mess up a well working machine with klipper but I may make the dice this week.

Stay tuned!