Extruder clicking when loading filament, leads to filament grinding
Hi all!
For the last month I've been having this issue with extruding filament from my relatively new (assembled on November 17th 2022) Prusa MK3S+. I've contacted Prusa technical support and had other people look at my issue, but to no avail. So around a month ago, I dissassembled my E3D V6 hotend to remove a piece of filament that was stuck in the filament path. Once I reinstalled the assembly, I've been having this constant extruder clicking noise coming from the extruder gear located in the idler door skipping which results in the grinding of the filament and thus eventually the printer stops extruding filament at all. I have been trying everything I (and Prusa technical support) can think of, so I will quickly summarize my efforts:
- Printing with the default settings on PrusaSlicer using both Prusament PLA as well as PLA filament from other brands.
- Loosening the extruder grub screw so the head of the screw is flush with the body of the extruder assembly (When the printer was working before the extruder disassembly, it was printing with the grub screw cranked down way too hard (the tension screw was sticking out around 5mm from the right side of the exruder). When trying to print with the same tension now, the clicking only gets louder. I suspect that the tension was perhaps so high that I could have damaged the bondtech gears?)
- Checking if the extruder gear axle in the door is fully inserted in both holes as seen in this video by Engineering Instructor on YT:
- Doing a cold-pull to clean the nozzle. I followed the guide on the website and the results came out the same as seen in the guide.
- Switching nozzles.
- Checking (disassembling) the entire hotend to ensure that the path of the filament is completely free.
- Installing a new PTFE tube.
- Starting a calibration wizard.
- Checking for heat creep in my extruder motor by pointing a fan at it.
- Reapplying thermal paste on the heatbreak to eliminate hotend heat creep.
- Checking if the teeth of the extruder gears are alligned, and although the teeth are just a teeny tiny bit misaligned, a prusa technical support employee ensured me that this shouldn't be the cause of the problem seeing how the misalignment is too minimal. I would like to reallign the extruder gears to see if this is indeed the problem, but the screw got stripped when I was installing it due to cranking it down too hard combined with the low quality hex keys that were included in the kit.
- Measuring and checking all my extruder hotend cables with a multimeter.
- Cleaning the extruder gears' teeth from filament dust with a copper wire brush.
The problem seems to be very unpredictable. One time it could print the first 10 layers of the print before clicking and stopping with extruding, the other time the clicking started on the first layer. I could even get it to print a perfect Benchy without any clicking, only for the printer to experience extruder clicking with a different model using the same settings. The fact that the extruder clicking often times also happens whenever I am just loading filament into the machine leads me to believe that the issue is hardware related. I appreciate everyone willing to help me fix this issue as I've been troubleshooting for tens of hours at this point and is both costing me a lot of energy physically as well as mentally. If you have any questions regarding the issue I've been having, please let me know. Thank you in advance for the effort 🙂
RE: Extruder clicking when loading filament, leads to filament grinding
Try loosen idler door screw it should be flush
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RE: Extruder clicking when loading filament, leads to filament grinding
Make sure the gear lines up with the ptfe tube
Please help me out by downloading a model it's free and easy but really helps me out https://www.printables.com/@Hello_474427/models
RE: Extruder clicking when loading filament, leads to filament grinding
And when the idler door open load fillemt put don't put fillament to the gear just so the motor spins if it still makes noise could be bad motor
Please help me out by downloading a model it's free and easy but really helps me out https://www.printables.com/@Hello_474427/models
RE: Extruder clicking when loading filament, leads to filament grinding
Thanks! Do you mean the head of the screw should be flush with the body of the extruder or the end of the screw?
RE: Extruder clicking when loading filament, leads to filament grinding
Head
Please help me out by downloading a model it's free and easy but really helps me out https://www.printables.com/@Hello_474427/models
RE: Extruder clicking when loading filament, leads to filament grinding
Yes head of screw should be flush
Please help me out by downloading a model it's free and easy but really helps me out https://www.printables.com/@Hello_474427/models
RE: Extruder clicking when loading filament, leads to filament grinding
Could you perhaps elaborate on what you mean with this?
RE: Extruder clicking when loading filament, leads to filament grinding
open idler door
Please help me out by downloading a model it's free and easy but really helps me out https://www.printables.com/@Hello_474427/models
RE: Extruder clicking when loading filament, leads to filament grinding
then push fillament to the sensor not the gear so printer spins extruder motor if youve got auto load on then when the motor spins if somthings still clicking then its probally the motor
Please help me out by downloading a model it's free and easy but really helps me out https://www.printables.com/@Hello_474427/models
RE: Extruder clicking when loading filament, leads to filament grinding
Hi there,
please allow a couple of comments:
- Checking if the teeth of the extruder gears are alligned, and although the teeth are just a teeny tiny bit misaligned, a prusa technical support employee ensured me that this shouldn't be the cause of the problem seeing how the misalignment is too minimal. I would like to reallign the extruder gears to see if this is indeed the problem, but the screw got stripped when I was installing it due to cranking it down too hard combined with the low quality hex keys that were included in the kit.
Although it seems impolite from me, but it is actually very rarely the tool that is at fault...
I assume you have made sure that the grub screw properly sits on the flat part of the motor axle? If not, that can cause some of your troubles. Fixing it with a stripped grub screw will be challenging to say the least. I personally haven't tried to remove the extruder motor from it's holder, but looking at the images it seems impossible to get it out without removing the gear. Meaning that you will either have to strip everything down as far as possible and drill out the ruined screw by hand or destroy some of the printed parts to get the motor free and then drill out the screw. Depending on the state of the thread on the gear after this you might need a new gear. (and potentially destroyed plastic parts).
For the sake of your mental health just let's assume for now that this won't be necessary and everything is aligned nicely.
A few months back I was having a very similar sounding clicking and stopping to extrude problem, that also drove me mad. I didn't go as far as you did in exchanging a lot of things, which proved lucky.
Prints would start reasonably ok and then extrusion got patchy, the clicking started and then everything stopped. The cold pulls I did actually looked acceptable to me and a nozzle change only provided a very short lived fix. Manually pushing the filament for the cold pull seemed awfully hard. So I heated everything up nicely (somewhere in the vicinity of 260) and applied the acupuncture needle. Out came a massive amount of old gunk.
Given the previous nozzle change the only place where this could have hidden must have been the very bottom part of the heat break.
I don't know of course if that is your problem but it might be worth a try.
hth
Hansjoerg