Random clogging, gear slippage
Have an odd thing going on guys, any guesses as to why would be very appreciated.
Lately randomly during prints my extruder gears start slipping...and i hear click click click. So i cancel the print open up the extruder area....snip the filament so i can pull most of it out but I def know some filament is still in the extruder.
Most would assume that piece is the problem right...well i can load filament right back into the machine and extrude it with no problem whats so ever.
So now it makes me think its not a clog at all its my gears failing to just pull the filament through.
heres a vid where you can hear the clicking and you can see the gear kind of trying to spin in the other direction.
The printer is pretty new but I've already done a couple 12 hr prints on it....these failures are happening 20-30 mins in.
Using Prusa PLA and It happened on a prusa tree frog file last night.
Re: Random clogging, gear slippage
What temp are you using? I was using Black PLA from maker geeks and at 215 I could hear the Extruder skipping hear and there. I raised the temp to 220 and it stopped clicking.
Re: Random clogging, gear slippage
Ive done various temps from 190 to 215...but what i did last night was just tighten the two screws holding the gears together a bit more and that seemed to do the trick.
Was able to do a 3 hr mutli color print using the palette+...worked perfectly.
So we'll just call this my own fault for now lol.
Re: Random clogging, gear slippage
Been getting something similar after many successful prints. This is one of the symptoms. I'm not sure that it is slippage of the drive gears, it seems to be a twitch of the motor. Like it misses a beat. The prints start ok, but now are failing after only a few layers. Had a couple fail recently after a couple of hours, when they came loose from the bed. Different issue but also curious as not happened before. Had a perfectly good one yesterday then today on same settings getting total failure within minutes.
Have seen a post on some of these issues but cant find it again.
Can't understand how it can suddenly start playing up when all main parameters are as previously successful. Whats going on? I've even been printing soft flex TPU with no problem so its a bit of a shock to have failure of fresh Prusa PLA.
Re: Random clogging, gear slippage
Tried a few things. Watching closely the extruder was going back and forth not extruding any filament. In Cura; Retraction was at 3mm and 65mms, and Z hop on.... changed it to 1mm and 30mm/s and turned off Z hop. Printing fine again now.
Hope that helps.