I’ve never really solved oozing issues with my makergear hotend. I get lots of threading, slightly rough vertical walls, terrible bridges, and other signs of oozing. I’ve tried changing temperature, tweaking retraction, changing speeds, etc.
I’ve tweaked things enough that I’m considering hardware upgrades. I’m currently printing with 3mm PLA through a .5mm nozzle. Would switching to 1.75mm filament and a .35-.4mm nozzle be likely to improve print quality by reducing the reservoir volume and increasing extrusion volume accuracy?
I’m not familiar with 3mm but it can’t be much different than 1.75 nozzles… at least in practice.
It’s entirely possible your hitting the limits of your current hotend. I struggled as well with my stock hot end, I upgraded to E3DV6 and it made a world of difference, My parts come out so much cleaner now.
Changing the hotend will probably have little effect.
Stringing can be due to excessive temperature or insufficient retraction. Rough walls could be due to over-extrusion.
As for bridges, how have you assessed it? I have printed many bridging torture tests with little success but prints requiring bridges work fine.
I suggest checking your printing conditions are right for your material, ensure your calibration is correct and check your slicer settings are correct.
Sounds like you are running much hotter than it is reporting - which could be due to a miscalibrated thermistor.
Turn down the temp slowly, until the extruder starts clicking, then raise by 5 degrees at a time until you get the desired print quality.
You may find you at running at “160” or even lower, due to the thermistor table being incorrect
Lower temperature does improve things a bit, but I find the layers don’t adhere well below 180-185, depending on the color.
Is your hotend a Teflon or PTFE lined hotend?
If so, make sure the liner is cut flush and fully flat against the nozzle seat.
If not, you will get a “melt well” of carmelized PLA in the gap between the liner and the nozzle, and make your life hell.
A tragic defect of the Geeetech J-Head was that the Teflon liner was 3mm too short, and would ride up inside the hotend and cause this exact issue.
Adding a 3mm spacer to the top of the liner turned a crap hotend into one of my favorites.
try faberdashery filament, i find it oozes much less