With that one (creality textured glass carborundum something or other) I kept hitting it with 95%+ IPA, it just gives out eventually. I switched to a textured spring steel plate recently, world of difference for petg, PLA, and tpu. It’s just another consumable :/

If you’re not ready to switch yet a layer of masking tape can get you by for awhile, it’s just a pain because the masking tape will need to be replaced about every other print depending on your settings.

It looks like a glass carborundum Creality plate. I have one of them, they work really well until one day they just don’t.

What did you do to that poor build plate?!?

Call me grape cause I’m jelly. That’s a really nice setup.

It’s 0.2 layer height, I wanna say it was 3 layers, but it could have been 4. The green I’m using is opaque at even one layer with these settings though

They’re manual changes. Annoying, but they work for basic stuff.

I’m excited to introduce you to this if you haven’t seen it!

https://teachingtechyt.github.io/calibration.html

I use this as a general guide for every time I buy a new material, manufacturer, and/or color of filament. There’s YouTube videos explaining everything every step of the way.

For a new printer (or significant modifications) I’d go through the whole thing. For new filament, if I haven’t used it before, I do flow calibration, temperature tuning, retraction tuning, pressure/linear advance tuning, and max flow tuning, not necessarily in that order. I’ve found that as I’ve learned and experimented more I’ve branched out into more esoteric tools for some things.

My filament printer is a fairly heavily modified ender 3 pro (spider hotend, direct drive, dual z axis, spring steel bed, solid bed spacers, herome gen 7 cooler, cr touch, stepper driver diodes, and an adxl345 waiting for me to mount and wire it… I think that’s it). So I’m not saying this as a Creality hater, I love my ender, I hate their software and firmware. I had a terrible time with their Marlin firmware and ended up building it myself. I’ve since switched to klipper though and highly recommend it, it got me a reasonable quality benchy in around 30 minutes.

My point there is that I have had a hard time with the default profiles across the board, even before the mods. For filament printing I use Prusaslicer, though I do like Superslicer and Orcaslicer seems nice as well, I just have all my profiles built for Prusaslicer and it generally just works.

I’m only adding this because I don’t already see someone mentioning it.

My first thought was bed leveling, because that’s always the first thing, especially with weird surface artifacts.

But looking at the bridging “above” the text and the gaps in the interface between the solid infill and your perimeters I suspect that you’ve got some under-extrusion going on.

Have you tuned your filament? If not I recommend giving that a shot and seeing if it doesn’t clear up those issues.

ETA: I’ve also found that with text printed on the base I have way better luck when I cut it about 1mm deep (for 0.2mm layer heights)

I just “finished” a herome parts cooler upgrade on the E3 pro. And holy shit has it made a difference.

I’m in the process of printing random gardening stuff while I put off setting my Saturn back up. I am like a year behind on printing Loot Studios stuff. I wanna paint some minis so bad.

Especially with those rubber-ish things. They seem to have a lot more expansion and contraction than the higher end springs.

Maybe that’s a good thing?

The only caution I’d add about doing it as a hobby too is that it’s super easy to burn yourself out. I think that’s why so many of us get into woodworking and gardening lol

+1 for overture, I’ve had very good luck with it. That said, I’m pretty sure PETG needs to be very dry in general. Prints beautiful just out of the box, but I have terrible stringing even storing everything sealed in vacuum bags after a few prints.

“if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room”

The short answer is “practice”

The longer answer is, do it a lot. Listen in code reviews. When you investigate bugs, do actual root cause analysis, understand the problem, and understand how it got missed. Don’t stop learning, study your languages, study design patterns, be intentional in what you learn.

I had good mentors that were hard on me in reviews. Developing a thick skin and separating criticism of you from criticism of your code will help a lot in terms of learning in reviews.

Source: 10 years in the field. (Senior SW Eng. Focused on embedded systems and VnV)