Orca V0.3 Extruder problems

Hello, I'm a new owner of an Orca V0.3 and I need some advice.

I've bought the printer pre-assembled from JHB, together with some filament which should be PLA. The printer works so far, but the extruder is far from being reliable, usually the filament starts to slip after two or three layers.

When I bought the printer it had a .35 nozzle, I thought that the nozzle is too small and made a 0.5 nozzle myself, which worked for some models, but the filament will still slip after a short while.

I need a pretty high temperature for printing, about 250°C. I need Kapton Tape for the print to stick, it does not stick well on a heated glass plate (ca. 70° according to my infrared thermometer) and it warps as you can see from the atached image. Also, there is some chemical smell when it's heated. From what I've read here I suspect it's ABS not PLA, or is my guess wrong?

I don't have other filament to try out, any help would be welcome.

I've got an orca too, just with J-head hotend. But I am curious who or what is JHB?

Sounds like you got ABS, i can't get PLA to stick to my kapton tape.

If you are having trouble with filament slipping, you might wanna consider the fault is with your hotend, i tried for weeks getting my v9 working to no avail

If you really have ABS (that should be apparent from the smell, and from the fact that it fairly quickly dissolves in acetone) you will probably need to increase the bed temperature. But don't raise the hot-end temperature any more, the PEEK can't take over 250 degrees.

The V9 extruder needs quite a lot of idler pressure. You can just tighten it to a point just before the filament starts to become too deformed. It's quite picky about it too, after you have found the right pressure, it's a good idea to measure how far the bolts are screwed in and keep using that.

I've had problems like these with my Orca 0.3, printing 1.75mm filament, both PLA and ABS. Raising the temperature to 250°C worked but I had problem with the hotend leaking, so I took the hotend and extruder apart for cleaning and readjustment.

While doing this I drilled the filament hole in the extruder block to 3.2mm. After doing this it suddenly works perfectly to extrude 1.75mm ABS at temperatures around 230°C. I suspect for 3mm filament an even bigger hole could be beneficial.

As far as spring tension is concerned I keep it at a minimum. I experimented with that for a while, but more tension only ever seemed to cause more problems. (I hear there's a different story with 3mm filament, where you basically can't get it too tight, but don't take my word for it.)

Finally, alignment of the extruder block and the hotend also seems very important. You want the hole in the extruder block right above the hotend hole. Also, try to make sure the filament is fed absolutely straight down the hotend when squeezed between the hobbed wheel and the idler block.

It's quite a tedious process to get it all aligned correctly but for me it's finally working as expected.

Hope this helps.

i use a makergear extruder and hotend (1.75) on my orca3
its soooooooo much easier to deal with.
it doesnt need to be aligned. its about 10 times more powerful.
and the hotend dosent need to be set so some ridiculous temp to work.

i believe the v9 gear and 624 idler is too small in diameter to work effectively.
also there are no hinged versions of the v9 as far as i know. agressive made
a nice one with a hold-down bolt on the front of it.

i would never a color change with a v9. but its easy on the m.g.

if set-up well, a v9 will print well. but i use it on my back-up printer.

Thank you for the input, folks. JHB is just the guy who sold me his printer, not a shop or something.

I have solved my problem, as it seems. The gap between the hotend and the extruder seems to be to big, the abs filament just bent sideways and did not go down the hotend. I found this thing on thingiverse, which solved the problem for me.

I will think about a makergear hotend, though, changing the color within a print surely is a nice thing and not possible with the v9.

That one seems to be able to solve a lot of problems. I'll definitely print one, once I get my printer up and running again, after I messed up the alignment again.

V9 extruder... No, that's definitely not a favourite.

IMHO V9 sucks (makemendel not mendel-parts). After so much frustration and almost deciding to trash complete 0.4 machine (mendelparts version) I purchased budaschnozzle 1.1 and never ever had any issues with hotend. I had to make new platform for X axis but it's working now.