What Is Elephant’s Foot?

Elephant’s foot is a defect where the lowest layers of a print spread outward slightly, causing the base of the part to widen. It can prevent assembly in precision-fit components and is visually unpleasant.

The cause: the first layers are crushed before fully solidifying due to the weight of the layers above and the heat of the print bed. The effect is amplified when the nozzle is too close to the bed.

Solutions: raise the Z-offset slightly, lower the bed temperature by 5–10°C, and reduce the first-layer extrusion to 90–95%. On the design side, the cleanest fix is to add a small 0.4–0.5 mm chamfer to the bottom edge of the part — the elephant’s foot disappears into the chamfer. Most slicers also offer an “elephant foot compensation” setting that handles this automatically.