Ender 3 - Poor printing of top layers

[dal3001]

Hi all,

Relatively new to all of this stuff. I recently bought an Ender 3 as my first printer and so far have just been playing around with it, trying prints with different settings to see what the differences are. I've started from the default "Standard Quality" profile in Cura for the Ender 3 and have made only a single change so far, I increased the bed temperature to 65c as it seemed I was having bed adhesion issues. This has helped a little, although it's still not perfect. I've tested changing a few other settings, like the retraction, nozzle temperature and print speed but it seems the further I've strayed from the stock "Standard Quality" profile, the worse the results have been generally.

I've had a couple of issues so far but the most common across all my prints is that the top layers (usually the final layers, annoyingly) are very poor quality from a structural perspective. I've actually found my prints to be very brittle in general. Mostly so far I've been printing mods/upgrades for the printer itself. I've attached an example of what I'm getting, it's like it lacks the density in the upper layers.

Any ideas why this could be the case? The extruder slips sometimes too if that could be related, I've read that it's the printer struggling to push out as much filament as it would like but this only happens to my prints intermittently and actually usually only on the first few layers.

I'm still having fun though!

Thanks!