Weird Artifacts when layers get small & fast

Strange issue I'm seeing with my new IDEX setup on VC4. Print quality could still be improved but is overall pretty decent, until nozzle swaps start occurring and layer times get very short. Things I've tired without any noticable change:

Adjusting temperature (ABS from 243 to 265)
Adjusting pressure advance all the way down to 0
Slowing down MASSIVELY (setting kliiper to 40% speed factor

Still all print look very very similar (some I stopped early but you get the idea). What else am I not thinking of that could be causing this that I can try to rule out?

Kevin Schwarz•2/19/25, 11:30 PM

How tight is the screw on your orbiter tension lever? I had a similar print result with a screw that was much too tight. That led to filament getting grinded slightly. Especially when doing small, fast moves.

The right tension for me is actually quite low, just maybe two full turns after the screw grabs onto the orbiter.

KKevin Schwarz How tight is the screw on your orbiter tension lever? I had a similar print resu...

CampapaloozaOP•2/20/25, 1:37 AM

Interesting...they're definitely snug so I will give that a shot thank you.

CCampapalooza Interesting...they're definitely snug so I will give that a shot thank you.

Kyreus•2/20/25, 9:23 PM

Do you have an update on that if that changed things? Curious to know if this could cause such issues

KKyreus Do you have an update on that if that changed things? Curious to know if this co...

CampapaloozaOP•2/20/25, 9:26 PM

Sorry, yes. It unfortunately did not. Let's just say the possibility of un-idex'ing this thing is still definitely not outside the realm of possibility.

Even slowing printing down to ~100mm/s and 2k accel is still pretty awful. About the only thing I haven't tried yet is pulling the spools off of their holders inside the printer, and just putting them on some super smooth rollers to eliminate any form of resistance from the possibility list

Kyreus•2/20/25, 9:27 PM

I got told that the benchy is a hardcore scenario for idex - I'm seeing the same artifacts on my benchys. I wanted to print something else but sadly my endstop gave up so I can't test further

KKyreus I got told that the benchy is a hardcore scenario for idex - I'm seeing the same...

CampapaloozaOP•2/20/25, 10:47 PM

Well feel free to keep me posted, and I'll do the same if I make any breakthroughs. Not holding out major hope at the moment though sadly

CampapaloozaOP•2/20/25, 10:48 PM

It might be a harder test, but the prints I'm getting so far make it seem impossible, which it shouldn't be.... especially at very very slow speeds

CampapaloozaOP•2/21/25, 2:03 AM

@Kyreus here goes nothing lol cross your fingers could get messy

CampapaloozaOP•2/21/25, 2:05 AM

Another benchy attempt, again at a (crazy slow) 100mm/s & 2k....trying to burn everything back to the ground and see if this thing is even capable of giving a reasonable quality print

Kyreus•2/21/25, 7:40 AM

how are your is graphs looking?

Kevin Schwarz•2/21/25, 7:53 AM

Do you have the same artifacting with other filament like pla? You could try that with a generic profile for pla.

KKevin Schwarz Do you have the same artifacting with other filament like pla? You could try tha...

CampapaloozaOP•2/21/25, 7:15 PM

Haven't yet tried PLA just cause ABS is what I already had loaded when I started messing with this. It is on my list, but honestly I've been delaying it because accepting "I can only do PLA" is less than ideal even if it were to work lol

KKyreus how are your is graphs looking?

CampapaloozaOP•2/21/25, 7:16 PM

Haven't even messed with IS yet but this is on my hopefully this weekend. Never felt like I could fully get the hybrid belts to the point where they a) weren't floppy and b) didn't makes my graphs look less than ideal on hybrid to begin with so I'm not holding out a ton of hope that they don't look rough on IDEX lol

CampapaloozaOP•2/21/25, 7:16 PM

But I plan to look into that more this weekend...hopefully

CCampapalooza Haven't yet tried PLA just cause ABS is what I already had loaded when I started...

Kevin Schwarz•2/21/25, 7:18 PM

No this isn‘t what i‘m suggesting, but traditionally i found it easier to troubleshoot problems with a simple filament like PLA and then later move on to more finnicky filament.
Also this makes it easy to rule out the slicer filament settings as PLa will genereally print quite fine, even if the numbers are a bit off.

CampapaloozaOP•2/21/25, 7:25 PM

That's fair. Pre-IDEX, my ABS profiles were pretty decent, but maybe something else has changed. It's on my list to give that a shot. Thanks!