the 7mm was a holdover from before i moved the extruder over to be mounted onto the x axisi don’t care so much about strining that’s simple to fix it’s the heatbreak clogging that’s the issue. As mentioned above, it’s not an issue with improper bowden seating as the residue is only inside the heatbreak and not where the ptfe tube sits. Also the ptfe tube is factory cut so definitely not the issue there. Nozzle does not push against the hotend tube as it sits on top of the heatbreak and does not go all the way through.

I’m thinking probably heat creep but turning down the temps should have helped with that.

there are pics please look at the imagur link.

I cannot post the pictures directly as the site is broken and i get a 400 invalid json error.

in case you didn’t notice the edit: https://imgur.com/a/XPKGI7D

pictures can be found here https://imgur.com/a/XPKGI7D

Apologies for the blurriness the stupid camera wouldn’t stop auto focusing on the wrong parts of the frame

will get a picture out soon but it’s the wholesale stuff creality sells or at least used to sell on the cheap

it’s probably not fair to call it an ender3 how modded it is at this point :) also it didn’t fix the problem just made it noticeably better.

Retraction was at 7mm but was causing clogs due to heat creap so i reduced it to 3mm.

I’m not worries about stringing as much as the residue