Free Guides
Whether something went wrong on your last print or you want to learn how to do something right - start here. 18 troubleshooting guides plus 30 how-tos covering calibration, hardware, filament, and model prep.
Personalized Fix Plan
Select your print issue, printer, and filament to get a custom fix plan with only the warnings, settings, and adjustments that apply to your setup.
Select Printer & FilamentJump straight to the most common print failures. These are ranked manually so the most useful guides appear first.
Something went wrong with your print? Diagnose the cause and apply the fix - ranked by what actually worked in the r/FixMyPrint community.
Filament curling behind the nozzle, lines that won't grab, prints peeling up after a few layers - first layer adhesion fails for a small set of reasons. Diagnose yours and fix it.
Bumpy, wavy or pitted top surfaces happen when top layers can't bridge the infill cleanly. Fix top layers, infill density, cooling and speed for a smooth finish.
Thin strings of plastic appearing between parts of your print? This is a retraction, temperature and moisture problem. Diagnose which one applies and dial it out.
Small bumps and pimples on the surface of your print are caused by pressure buildup at line starts and stops. Fix them with pressure advance, seam placement, wipe and coasting.
Gaps in walls, thin lines, missing infill - under-extrusion has five common causes. Diagnose which one applies to your print and fix only that one.
The print is fine until a certain layer, then everything above is offset in one direction. This is a mechanical step-skipping problem. Diagnose and fix it.
Cracks between layers, prints that snap along layer lines - delamination is a thermal fusion failure. Fix temperature, cooling and layer height to bond layers properly.
Wave or echo patterns showing up on print walls after corners? This is mechanical vibration. Fix it with speed, belt tension and input shaping.
Extruder clicking, no plastic coming out, or print quality degrading mid-print? Distinguish between a regular clog and heat creep, then fix the right one.
Overhangs sagging, curling up, or printing as fuzzy strings? This is a cooling and speed problem. Maximize cooling, slow overhangs, and reorient where possible.
Corners curling up off the bed mid-print? Warping is differential cooling shrinkage. Fix it with bed temperature, brim, enclosure and adhesion.
Visible vertical seam line down one side of every print? You can't eliminate the seam, but you can hide it and minimize its visibility with placement, pressure advance and scarf seams.
Bridges sagging or breaking mid-span? Fix bridging with maximum cooling, slower bridge speed, reduced bridge flow, and smarter model orientation.
Supports leaving ugly marks on overhangs and bridges? Fix Z-distance, interface layers, support pattern and switch to tree/organic supports for clean release.
Bumpy surfaces, oversized parts, walls that don't sit flat? Over-extrusion has four common causes. Diagnose flow rate, e-steps, filament diameter and temperature.
Base of your print bulging out wider than the rest? That's elephant foot. Fix it with Z-offset, slicer compensation and first-layer temperature.
Hearing pops and crackles while printing? Your filament is wet. Learn how to dry every common filament and store it so it stays dry.
Repeating horizontal rings on your print? Z-banding is a mechanical Z-axis problem. Learn the cheap fixes that solve it on most printers.
Pick your printer, filament, and problem. FixMyPrint generates slicer settings instead of making you guess.
Generate My FixLearn how to do it right the first time. Calibration, hardware maintenance, filament handling, model prep - step-by-step instructions with exact settings.
The definitive PLA settings guide. Get the right nozzle temp, bed temp, speed, retraction, and cooling settings for reliable PLA prints on any FDM printer.
PETG is strong and flexible but tricky to dial in. Get the right temperature, retraction, and cooling settings to print PETG without stringing or adhesion issues.
Cura is the most popular slicer but has 400+ settings. This guide covers the ones that actually matter - with recommended values for PLA, PETG, and ABS.
E-step calibration sets how many motor steps your firmware needs to push 1 mm of filament. Get this wrong and every print is over- or under-extruded by a fixed percentage.
A temperature tower prints the same model at progressively different nozzle temperatures, letting you pick the temperature that produces the best layer adhesion, surface finish, and minimal stringing for your specific filament.
Bed levelling - properly called tramming - sets the build plate parallel to the nozzle's travel plane so the first layer lands at the same Z height across the whole bed.
Z-offset is the gap between nozzle and bed at the start of every print. Get it right and the first layer lands as flattened tubes that fuse together; get it wrong and you have either smeared sheets or gappy lines that won't stick.
Skirt, brim and raft all add filament around your model's first layer, but they solve different problems. Pick the right one for your print or you'll waste time and material on the wrong solution.
Supports prevent overhangs from sagging by giving them something to print against. Configure them right and they hold the print and release cleanly; configure them wrong and they fuse to the model or collapse mid-print.
Tree (or 'organic') supports grow branching structures that touch the model at small specific points - less surface area touching the model, less scarring, less filament used.
How a model sits on the build plate determines how strong it is, how many supports it needs, where the seam shows, and where surface texture is best. The right orientation is often the difference between a clean print and a frustrating one.
A clean build plate is the single biggest factor in first-layer adhesion. Skip cleaning, and your print fails halfway through despite perfect Z-offset and bed temp. The right cleaner depends on your surface.
Pressure Advance (Klipper) and Linear Advance (Marlin) compensate for the lag between extruder commands and actual flow. Calibrated, they virtually eliminate seam blobs and produce sharper corners.
A cold pull (or atomic pull) clears debris from inside the nozzle without disassembly. Heat to print temp, drop to a specific lower temp, then yank the filament out hard - the cooled tip drags debris with it.
Nozzles wear out - especially brass nozzles printing abrasive filaments. Replacing one takes 5 minutes if you do it hot. Doing it cold strips the heat block threads and turns a $5 fix into a $50 hotend replacement.
Belts that are too loose cause layer shifts and ringing; belts that are too tight cause stepper drag and skipped steps. There's a goldilocks zone, and finding it takes 2 minutes.
PTFE tubes wear and degrade with use - especially when printing at temperatures over 240C. Replacing them is cheap and fast, and a fresh tube fixes a surprising number of intermittent extrusion problems.
All three problems look similar - extruder clicking, weak or no extrusion - but each has a different fix. Diagnose first, fix second.
Wet filament prints badly - popping sounds, surface defects, weak layers. Drying restores it. Each filament has its own temperature and time, and going too hot deforms the spool.
Filament stored in open air absorbs moisture and degrades. Sealed storage with desiccant keeps it print-ready for months or years. The right setup costs $20 and lasts forever.
Wet filament symptoms look like a dozen other failures - stringing, weak layers, rough surfaces. The fastest way to rule it in or out is checking specific tells before tweaking other settings.
Most slicers scale models in three ways: uniform percentage, exact size, or per-axis scale. Pick the wrong one and a tightly-fitting part becomes loose, or a part designed in inches comes out 25.4x too small.
Models bigger than your build plate can be split into pieces, printed separately, and joined. Done well, the seam is barely visible and the joined part is nearly as strong as one print.
STLs from random downloads often have holes, flipped normals, or intersecting surfaces - your slicer either refuses to slice them or produces weird results. Repair tools fix most of these in one click.
Layer height controls print quality, speed, and strength. Smaller layers = better surface detail but longer print time. Larger layers = faster but visible layer lines and weaker bonds. Pick by use case.
Infill is the lattice inside your print. Pattern affects strength direction and slice time; density affects strength and weight. Pick deliberately or you'll over-print decorative items and under-print functional ones.
Flow rate is the per-filament fine-tune that sits on top of e-step calibration. Get it right and walls measure exactly the line width you set; get it wrong and prints are systematically over- or under-extruded.
Part cooling makes overhangs and bridges work, controls layer adhesion, and prevents heat creep. Setting it wrong for your filament breaks one of those things every time.
Variable layer height makes the slicer use thicker layers on flat regions and thinner layers on curves. Same print quality where it matters, less time everywhere else.
Splicing filament joins two pieces - typically the end of one spool to the start of another - so you can finish a print without changing spools or waste short remnants.
Skip the manual work. FixMyPrint generates exact slicer settings for your printer and filament in seconds.
Try Free - No Card Required