Extruder

I was noticing my extruder motor seems to be stalling leading to prints that are sparse. I tried changing the gear, cleaning out the hobbed bolt, increasing the pololu voltage. I also tried tightening the screws and also opening them up. When the filament is not stalling, the plastic is coming out of the heated end just fine. Any suggestions? Thanks.

A few guesses would be:

1) Lower gear on the extruder has tightened against the extruder body.

2) Filament too large for the bowden tube.

3) The end of the bowden tube has collapsed a little since assembly.

4) Hotend too hot and causes the filament to swell up and increases friction.

5) Hotend too cold and you use up all the molten plastic and it can not melt more fast enough.

6) Current too high on the driver and it is actually going into thermal protection mode which could look like skipping steps.

7) Extruder idler not tight enough so when it does retractions it chews up the filament which then gets jammed in the bowden tube.

8) Some other filament issue. I have a roll of blue and some glow in the dark that I just can't get to print well unless I print it with a large nozzle really fast. I think it may be the thermal expansion I spoke of in 4 and the reason it works with the large nozzle at high speeds is because it gets pushed through the hotend so fast it has no time to swell.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/23/2013 04:13PM by Sublime.

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Did you figure this one out? I'm having the same problem

neptix

I was having a similar problem at one point and a quick tear-down / re-build of the extruder assembly fixed it for me. I think some extra friction had somehow been introduced to a certain part of the rotation, but not sure of the exact culprit.

#1 was a problem for me at one point, as was the small gear becoming loose on the motor shaft.