Kill the wispy strings and blobs with a few targeted settings
Stringing is those thin hairs and blobs left behind when the nozzle travels across open space between two parts of a model. It happens because molten plastic oozes out of the nozzle during travel moves. Fixing it is mostly about controlling that ooze with retraction, temperature and travel speed — and starting with dry filament. Change one thing at a time and you'll dial it out.
Retraction pulls filament back before a travel move so it stops oozing. If you string, increase the retraction distance and/or speed. On a direct-drive extruder, start around 0.5–2 mm; on a Bowden setup, you'll need more — often 3–6 mm. Retraction speed of roughly 25–45 mm/s is a good starting range. Too much retraction can cause clogs and grinding, so raise it gradually and watch for under-extrusion.
Hotter plastic is runnier and oozes more. If retraction alone doesn't clear it, drop the nozzle temperature in 5 C steps. PETG is especially prone to stringing and usually benefits from printing at the lower end of its range. The classic way to find the sweet spot is to print a "temperature tower," which prints the same shape at descending temperatures so you can read off the cleanest one.
Moisture is a huge and often-overlooked cause of stringing. Wet filament steams at the nozzle and oozes far more than dry filament, and no amount of retraction tuning fully fixes it. If a spool that used to print clean suddenly strings, dry it before changing anything else.
The fastest way to fix stringing is to print a small stringing test (two thin towers with a gap) and change a single variable each run. Note the retraction distance, speed and temperature you used and how clean the result was. Within a handful of test prints you'll have a profile that travels without leaving a single hair behind — and you can reuse it for that material forever.
Save your best-known settings per material so you never have to re-derive them. That record is the difference between guessing and printing right the first time.
Save your dialed-in profiles in PrintLog →