Help With Hot End Please

Hello everyone. I am new to the hobby and have recently built a printer from BotMill's kit. I am able to print really high quality prints, but when skeinforge decides to take the long route with no extrusion, I get a delay when it starts back up and therefor no plastic or sloppy plastic. This is compounded greatly when printing in small areas that keep making the extruder go on and off.

Also, every ten minutes or so the plastic will come out molten and mess the layer up while dragging junk everywhere. This is sooo frustrating!

And to compliment these issues, the hot end will ooze the very moment the extruder stops, depleting its reserve. Please help if you can....I cannot stand to spend another two weeks honing this. thank you!

*extruding at 185c, yellow PLA, Gen 6 electronics, 210 float speed

-Will

Hi Kwdelre,

I seemed to have roughly the same problem as you a month or two ago. I seemed to fix it by a mix of lowering the temperature down just a tad and increasing the amount skeinforge tells the extruder to retract the filament while moving, theoretically sucking in the plastic while moving.

I swapped to using Slic3r round then too, and although it's much simpler than SK, it does the job while you fine tune your settings.

P.S. I've got my retract distance set to 3mm if that's but a starting point for you

Ollie

Thank you for the reply. I may have to try that slic3r program.
In skeinforge are talking about the oozebane setting?

I'm not particularly familiar with botmills hotend kit but I used to have similar problems with the Makergear hotend. Adding a fan minimized the melting zone of the hotend. I guess you can say it keeps the hot end hot and the cool end cool or at least cooler. I'm not sure if the botmill kit already implements one but I found it helps cut down on unwanted oozing.

Hope that will help.

bdc
~Stay Calm Out There

No, oozebane is obselete (and designed for the old dc motor extuders).
Retraction is in the Dimension tab of Skeinforge.
Activate Dimension and set the retraction speed.

---

Bob Morrison
Wörth am Rhein, Germany
"Luke, use the source!"
BLOG - PHOTOS - Thingiverse

Some kinds of firmware (e.g. repetier) already have the retraction algorithm implemented.

Thank you for the replies everyone.
Now that you say that I think they did tell me it was part of the firmware. Either way I'll try to play with the settings.

I rigged an airline from a fish pump to lightly blow on the plastic as it comes out. Not sure if I have noticed much difference. Does anyone have an example of a fan being implemented to stop oozing? Just point a small fan at the unit or mount something close and direct to the top portion of the hot end?

I read somewhere that the temp readings are often skewed between the thermistor and RepSnapper. I guess I can keep lowering the temp to see if it will stop oozing.

Here's a fan duct that i've had pretty good success with [www.thingiverse.com].

It's pretty successful with the Makergear hotend because the thermistor and the brass nozzle and heatercore are really well insulated. The rest of the barrel that the filament travels through to the heatercore isn't insulated. With the fan blowing through the duct it, as I mentioned before, helps keep the cool end cool and the hot end hot. This also keeps the area of where the plastic melts around where the heatercore is and not so high up on the hot end. I think this is why you're getting oozing.

I hope this helps!

bdc
~Stay Calm Out There