Elephant foot on the bottom layer
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The bottom layers are squashed wider than the rest of the part. Raise the Z offset slightly and drop the bed temperature — those two together fix nearly every case.
Elephant foot matters when parts have to fit together. A base that is 0.3 mm oversized turns a sliding fit into an interference fit, and people usually blame the model.
The bottom two or three layers bulge out beyond the part outline
Excess first layer squish, softened by a bed that is too hot
- Raise the Z offset by 0.01-0.02 mm and reprint the base only.
- Drop the bed temperature 5 degC. A bed running hot keeps the lower layers soft enough to spread under the weight above.
- Enable elephant foot compensation in the slicer, typically 0.1-0.2 mm.
- Add a small chamfer to the bottom edge in CAD. This is the most reliable fix for parts that must fit.
- Turn part cooling on from layer two rather than layer three or four.
Change one at a time so you know which mattered.
Compensation is a patch, not a fix
Slicer compensation shrinks the first layer outline to cancel the bulge. It works, but it is correcting a symptom. If you need more than about 0.2 mm of compensation, the Z offset or bed temperature is wrong and you are hiding it.
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