3D Printing Forum

Dear all, I am looking for a solution to an irregularity in the upper layers of my prints.
The layers appear to be relatively misaligned after 30%, 40%, 50% of printing (depending on the height of the part). I have noticed that fact occurs on the trapezoidal parts. I use an Ender 3 V2/Cura, but this misalignment occurs with other slicers software as well ( as Creality, Bambu and Prusa ). I have tried printing the same part in different positions of the print bed, but without success. Another attempt was to print parts very close to the Z axis (since the Ender 3 V2 does not have two motors on this axis). Tried to decrease/increase the top layer speed, but no success.What could be the mystery?
Thank you very much in advance.

Hi,

Usually when I see issues as a print goes up the z axis, I wonder if there's some issues with the feed system. Is filament getting tangled up?

Or there's also z banding, which CNC kitchen has done some videos on.

Is this with every material or just that particular one?

One thing I ran into was filament not feeding smoothly. If it’s snagging on the spool or unrolling weirdly, it can mess with the extrusion and cause shifts.
Oh, and vibrations can be sneaky. If your printer’s sitting on a shaky table or something, that might be part of the problem. I threw mine on a sturdier surface, and it smoothed things out a bit. Random side thought—messing with different tech setups, like looking into DFT printer vs sublimation printer, gave me some new ideas on how hardware affects output quality.