Print Quality- Adjacent Rows Not Touching

[Rolffeof6]

Wondering If Anyone Has Suggestions For Solving This PQ Issue...

Towers are square with the built plate
Height adjustment meticulously completed multiple times; problem persists
End-stop switches mounting screws are tight and threadlocked
Belts are tight
Extruder hobbed-gear is clean with no embedded filament

See attached pics

Overall View

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Lower Left

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Upper Right

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[IMBoring25]

How are you doing your Z height adjustment and are you doing it with the bed hot? Especially at what you have labeled as the upper right the skirt looks like Z=0 is still a little high. Have you calibrated the feed from your extruder drive and are you slicing with an extrusion multiplier?

[Rolffeof6]

Checked the play in the effector. I think my belts might need tightening after all... or something loose in the carriage-arm-effector subassembly. I won't be able to check it out and make adjustments for a week or so.

[Rolffeof6]

Thank you IMB for your reply-

I am doing the Z-height by the manual using 24# paper (may need to go back to 20# paper). In other parts of this test print the plastic is very thin. The bed is at printing temp when I adjust height. I have done no extruder calibrations. Been running this beast for over 2 years- this problem cropped up about 3 weeks ago. If the belts/carriage/arms doesn't resolve this issue, I will follow your advice on extruder calibration.

[IMBoring25]

I use the paper technique on my Mendel because it's harder to see. I tune it for a lot of grab, so much that I can pull the paper through put not push it (it's also relevant that this is on a spring-loaded bed). From a lightly-grabbed paper setting, you should probably lower the nozzle by almost the thickness of the paper. I just eyeball the Rostock since it's so easy to see the hot end come together with its reflection in the glass.

If the extrusion gets significantly thicker and thinner as it goes around the bed, barring the looseness you're starting to think might be there, additional adjustments to calibration need to be made. With basic hand-cal, the easy ones are endstops and horizontal radius. I used a single-layer-width, single-layer-height "Mercedes symbol" covering almost the entire bed to fine-tune those settings on my machine and understand where the remaining idiosyncracies were.