Help - Nozzle drags across print during travel

Ender Series Creality Ender-3 V3 KE/SE
1

My Ender 3 V3 SE printed well for about a week or two. I have quite a few prints that look fine.

Then now I’m seeing smooth lines melted across the top surface. For some reason, it’s traveling across the finished surface and dragging a trail in the surface. I figured it out by stepping through the gcode in Cura and I can see where it’s finishing the surface, then moving across what it just filled in, to draw something else in the center. I didn’t know why it seems to be drawing it in the reverse order from outside in.

The prints look terrible because they have these smooth lines across them like stripes etched into them.

What could it be? I’ve already done auto level a few times and the bed is pretty flat so it’s not mechanical.

I also tried turning on z-hop but that didn’t help, and I’ve never needed that before.

Thanks in advance for any advice! I’m getting very frustrated because it’s been nothing but trouble with this printer :frowning: I thought I had it working then this started happening. I was excited when I got this printer, but not anymore. My Ender 2 Pro is a lot more reliable.

2

I have determined after a lot of testing, that the “Ironing” setting is causing this problem. If I disable Ironing, the nozzle doesn’t end up performing travel moves through the material.

Ironing is something I used regularly for all my prints because they had horizontal flat surfaces and it worked well. It’s not working on this printer.

Without ironing, the top surface looks extremely bad now. It’s very grainy and the print lines are very textured. The lines are very bad.

I’m going to try one or two more tests today to see if I can adjust extrusion. If that doesn’t help, I’m going to just give up.