Drag mark when printing flat surface

Hello, I am printing a part that on the top surface is flat with ahole in the middle. There is of course a natural diagonal “grain” effect on the surface when printed, But when the head finishes it moves across diagonally in the opposite direction and leaves a very faint mark in the surface.

Is there a way to tell the head to only move in one direction, or to raise up a couple of mm before crossing the part?

Hi Gary,

I suspect those lines are heat marks from the nozzle sliding over the layer during travel movements, in which case that’s entirely normal as the Z-hop setting is usually set to exactly the layer height. The layer below might be slightly expanded because of heat etc; resulting in light contact of a 200+ degree hot end and a very cosmetic / almost immeasurable line appearing on the object.

You could experiment with retraction settings by clicking the … as shown below

Yea I think that’s exactly what it is. I have tried playing around with retraction with no joy. Is it possible to tell it to raise the head a few mm before it moves? I am using Cura btw.

What layer height and Z-hop height settings did you have? Z-hop is the setting that controls the extruder height during those travel events. It’s unusual if you’ve had no success, you could make it much further than optimal, resulting in longer prints and non-essential wear

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Hey there you go, didn’t know about Z hop!! That’s exactly the info I needed. Will play around with that and see how it goes. I am happy to wear a bit longer print time when going for the best quality :slight_smile:

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