I’ve got another ten years or so before I consider retiring, but I’m close enough that this kind of stuff has been on my mind lately. Retirement itself is easy – just don’t ever get sick, have any accidents, or reach the age where the insurance companies decide it’s cheaper to pay your family for a wrongful-death suit than to pay for your medical costs. The bastards will choose to murder you every time.

I’ve seen the opposite being true… A loved one dies after a lifetime together and the other person no longer has the will to keep going. I think you can keep going as long as you have the desire and your body doesn’t give out on you (and your insurance company doesn’t deny you a life-saving procedure because they think you’re too old and need to die).

Sorry, just because you’re not capable enough to work with something that wasn’t completely fine-tuned for you at the factory doesn’t mean many of the rest of us have any problems with these machines. I do manual bed leveling and I can walk away from my printer for a year, turn it on, and pop out as good of print as the previous time it was used. How well does your “real” printer work after a year of neglect and with all the fancy gizmos turned off?

Hmm I’m out of ideas then, sorry. Still wouldn’t hurt to do a single-layer test print (there are various models that put squares all around the bed) just to see how that’s looking. If the issue had been confined to one side or one corner it might have been a mechanical issue, but random areas makes it a lot harder to figure out.

If I remember right, jerk settings should be rather small, like single-digits, but I think calibrating your e-steps will go a lot further for cleaning up the prints.

One other step (and of course I cannot remember what this is called) is related to calibrating the filament ‘pressure’ along each path. It takes a bit of work to set up but the goal is to create a profile so you get a perfectly consistent amount of filament extruded through the entire length of a path, which compensates for excess amounts at the beginning and end of each path, or too little extrusion through the middle. You might even have to compile your own firmware to enable it if there’s not an option in Marlin to turn it on from the software (I was compiling my own anyway for a DIY direct-drive extruder), but it really does make a difference and it’s a set-and-forget thing that you only really need to do once.

Creality bases are notoriously NOT flat although I’ve heard their quality has improved over the years. I have one of the 1st-gen Ender 3 Pro machines with a terrible dip in the aluminum base. One nice thing about a thicker bed material is that you can use discs of aluminum foil the shim the base. I started with a glass bed and 13 layers of foil to get the glass reasonably flat. I have since moved to 3mm G10 with a PEI sticker which is working pretty well (in case you want to try PEI again). I found some scrap G10 material on ebay and chopped it with a table saw, sanded all the edges, then got a PEI sheet that was 10mm wider than my bed to allow for some slop. Putting down the stickers is a lot easier if you have someone helping you. Then trim the overhang and you’re ready to go.

Yeah that’s a pretty tight range for the bed leveling, shouldn’t be causing any issues then. OK another possibility here… the failing prints, are they on the left side, right side, one specific corner, or does it tend to move around between prints?

E-steps varies per extruder, not per manufacturer. What they recommend will get you close but there will always be some variance. On my printer Creality recommended a setting of 93 but my measurements put me up around 98, so quite a difference. Are you still using a bowden tube style extruder or did you upgrade to a direct drive? And is your filament spool mounted on top of the printer (if so, what guides have you added for the filament path), or did you move it off to the side?

Erg sorry, jerk is probably what you’re looking for here. It’s been awhile since I did much printing so I keep confusing the terms.

Belt tension should be tight enough that you can strum it and hear a tone. It’s possible to tighten a belt TOO much, which causes extra stress on the motors. This would result in the motors being physically very hot. However if these were both printed at the same time, that wouldn’t be the issue here.

I wonder, how level is your bed? Yes yes, you have a bltouch and all that, but you still need to manually get your bed relatively level. Were these two prints next to each other or on opposite sides of the bed? How did the other prints in the same batch compare (like was there an obvious pattern of failure from one side to the other)? The bad print looks to me like the nozzle is too close, so it might be interesting to see what your first layer looks like in a test across the bed.

Even in the good print there’s some blobbing at the end of each path and the main surface should be the same height as the walls around the cutouts. Did you calibrate your E-steps? It kinda looks like you’re pushing out a little too much filament. depending on your slicer options, you may also check acceleration to slow down the head at the end of each path, which can help give the whole path a more uniform output.

One other consideration, although not as likely… Warm up the bed and check to see if all areas feel like they’re about the same temperature. If part of the heating element went bad then maybe you’re over-heating one part to compensate for a lack of heat on the rest of the bed. I only mention this because the bad print looks like it has a slant to it, but that could be an illusion of the photo.

How much privacy do you have when someone has your account password?

Gee are you implying that storing passwords in plaintext is a bad thing? /s

My best lens for capturing the sun and moon is a Canon EF 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6, which sounds like pretty much the same lens you have with a different mount? I found a Kenco doubler that doesn’t seem to produce any artifacts (this one goes on the back side of the lens) which has worked really well for grabbing sunspots. Wish I’d had more ambition to get out this Summer, there’s been a LOT of sunspot activity that I’ve missed.

On the other end I have a Sigma DC 17-70mm f2.8-4 which I’ve been using for model trains. I paid $233 for that one so it’s my most expensive, but getting a faster lens really helped with those low-light shots. Sometimes you find great deals, sometimes you find Chinese garbage. Luckily I never paid much for garbage.