High Schoolgeneral

Troubleshooting: Problems and Solutions

What can go wrong during a print: failures, warping, blobs and practical steps to diagnose and resolve them.

⏱ Estimated time: 15 min

Procedure

A Guide to the Most Common Problems and How to Solve Them.

🔎 Quick Diagnostic Chart

Symptom → Cause → Solution

See Guide #3: Solving Common Problems for detailed instructions

A quick overview of the most common failures and their causes. For detailed troubleshooting steps, see Guide No. 3.

Spiderwebs (stringing): Too high temperature or insufficient retraction
Warping: Dirty pad, wrong temperature or missing brim
Holes in the walls: Under-extrusion: clogging, low temperature, fast printing
No extrusion / clicking: See recommended range for this material.
Waves on the walls (ghosting): Loose belts or too high acceleration
The model came loose: Bad Z-offset or dirty pad
Spaghetti (Chaos of Layers): Detachment from the mat during printing
Layer shifting: Skipped steps: belts allowed or high speed

Principle #1: Use this recommendation while configuring your print.
Principle #2: Check the cheapest causes (pad, filament, temperature) first, then tackle the hardware.

🚨 Critical printing failures

What to Do If Printing Fails Midway Through

Spaghetti press = stop immediately, do not tear when hot

Critical failures are situations that cannot be resolved without stopping the print job. How to respond to them properly.

Unsticking the model (spaghetti): Stop printing, let cool to ~140 °F, then gently remove the tangle of filament. Do not clean in heat.
Clogging mid-print: Pause printing, perform a Cold Pull or replace the nozzle. Then try to resume printing via Resume Print.
Layer shifting: Stop printing. Check belt tension and loose screws. Start printing again from the beginning.
Power interruption: Modern printers (Bambu, Prusa, Creality) have Power Loss Recovery. After power is restored, the printer continues from the last point.