Please help me! PLA problem

Hey so I’ve been working on a project involving small gears I need printed. I’m using PLA. The teeth come out fine but as you see in the picture there is a protrusion out of the top of these gears of varying lengths. They are all coming out terrible. It’s like the machine can’t accurately place the layers directly on top of each other. At first I thought it was the heat distorting such a small area but I’ve messed around with the cooling fan speeds and even printed whole batches of these gears together so each layer had sufficient time to cool but I can’t make sense of it. I’ve tried speeding up and slowing down the print times to about 20mm/s and nothing is working, Ive got a .5mm nozzle and I’ve made sure the filament diameter is measured and imputed correctly. I’m not sure what more to do here and it almost seems that it’s getting worse. Any advice or further ideas would be awesome

That looks like a combination of too hot of an extrusion temp and to much slop in the x carriage. Grab your toolhead and try (gently) rocking it left / right, front / back. I’m willing to bet you will see a fair bot of slop from the igus bushings or from the toolhead mount itself. You can try to remove that slop, and try lowering temps to see if it helps. With parts that small you can also try an external fan (small desk fan) to help with cooling.

ive got the taz 6 and ive only had it since december, I dont see any x carriage shlop. and ive tried lowering the temp from the reccomended 210 for PLA to 190. idk what else to do, tighten the x-axis drive belt maybe? try dropping temp lower?

You may want to do a calibration test on your tool head. It looks like it’s overextruding.
https://ohai.lulzbot.com/group/calibration/

Also, you may want to take a look at the stl file and verify that there are no manifold errors. If you have errors in the file it can also cause deformations.
If you continue to have issues after that, get with tech support and they can give you some suggestions.

So your gears are turning out good, but the “shafts” are blobby looking.
It’s definitely a heat problem.
When printing small cylinders, the cylinders need very much extra cooling.
Try blowing through a straw directly at the cylinders as they are printing.
This will make a very big difference on how your parts turn out, If you have good lungs.

I would not build gears with shafts built in, in the manner you are doing them.
If you put a very small amount of side pressure on your “shafts”, they will snap off very easily.

Small parts are tricky to build.
Sometimes you are better off changing the design to incorporate other materials.

I hope my comments help you in some manner.

thank you everybody, i think heat has something to do with it because when i had tried it without any infill, it came out better, i think if i lowered the shell thickness it would come out good too, what im making them for they dont take much strain… but i think it also has to do with my nozzle size for such a small piece, i ordered a .3 nozzle so we will see how it turns out. i will post pictures. thank you everybody for your support

Set the minimal layer time (open full settings on Cura…click through the tabs til you find it) something like 20-30 seconds. The default is usually 5.

That should do it. The layers on those axles are just melting right together.

So did your problem get solved and what worked? I am voting on layer time.

FWIW: Design notes: I like to do the shafts and the gears separately. I lay the shafts on their sides. Of course then you need a flat spot on the shaft. Then I incorporate the flat spot into the gear thus making a stronger joint that is also MUCH easier to print:
This is not a gear set per say but I have it handy and it is the exact same concept: