Printing mess in one direction

Hi folks,

I am facing an annoying problem with my prusa mendel: low quality printing after some height... the problem is self descriptive with the attached picture, i believe.

Any ideas of what might be causing it?

I have tested:

- X axis backslash (it looks fine);
- all belts and bolts...
- mechanical stability (even moved the printer to a very stable marble table);

The movements look fine, and it is weird that it is happening only in one side, isn't it?

Cheers,

algol.

Looks like a cooling (or lack thereof) issue to me. Does this happen more often with small items? Have you tried using a fan? What about your cooling settings in your slicer?. Both slic3r and skeinforge offer the ability to slow down if a layer prints too quickly otherwise. Have you tried enabling this?

Basically you've got to get one layer cooled before you lay the next layer of plastic on top of it.

I agree it's a cooling issue, are you printing abs or pla? pla just point a fan at the dodgy bit and you'll be fine. abs is more tricky, you probably want to reduce print speed or print more things at once to allow for cooling. The fact it's only one side will either be due to a draft from the other direction (maybe a fan somewhere on your printer, maybe draughts in the room), or the fact that that is where the layer transition happens.