Do NEMA stepper motors go out?

Hi Guys,
I've been trying to figure out why my extruder keeps stopping, and am wondering if the motor has failed. Do they do that? I've been printing regularly for about a year

I'm using Airtriper's Bowden extruder and about 3/4 through a sizable print, it will make a clunking noise - about once a second or so and no filament moves. If I pull the bowden tube out of the extruder end, it will feed but if I put the least resistance on the filament, it clunks and the filament doesn't feed.

I tried a new motor driver module, but no change.

Your thoughts?

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They can, but since they don't use brushes they usually have a very long life. Bearings can wear or if they were ever disassembled or loosened they could become misaligned. A winding could also have an intermittent connection that is heat related and is only present after the motor has ran for a period of time and the heat allowed to "soak". A fan blowing on the stepper might help confirm that it's heat related. I'd also double check all your visible connections to make sure that they they are all tight.

Did the motor get very hot to the touch?

I had something similar a couple of weeks ago.
Id set my stepper drivers a bit high due to a misunderstanding on the direction of turn of the pot. Drv8834's.
Also i had some excessive wear on my x-axis rods that was causing the bearings to bind a bit.
Those two together caused my x-acis stepper motor, not the driver board, to get so hot it nipped up and stopped.
I double checked the stepper driver wadnt tripping on overheating.
When it cooled down it was fine until again on the longer print it stopped again.

Replaced the damaged smooth rods, bearings and set the driver to the correct power and the stepper motor stayed cool again.
Its happy now and printing for hours on end.

Gordon

So far, the problem seems to be the cheap filament I got from Magic Cube on Amazon. I had been using their material for some time and got quite good results from the yellow and red. This roll is blue and when I switched to some Inland brand I got from Microcenter, the problem is gone. It still clunks on the first layer, but I usually set the first layer pretty close to make sure it sticks. So far, have run a half-dozen runs with single and multiple objects and no mid-print failure yet.

Going to put the blue back in later and see if it fails again

update after that.

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