Ironing causes clogging and extruder gears clicking
This is my first post on here as this problem has me completely stumped...I've used the ironing feature many times before and it's always worked beautifully until I placed my printer in an enclosure (I print PLA btw). I've noticed that my enclosure temps were reaching 30-32C and eventually my extruder gears began to click, this was the first time I've ever ran into this problem.
After doing some research, I have opened the doors on the enclosure as well as the side panels. However the clicking returned. I've even gone to the extent of putting a small table fan blowing into the open enclosure to get better airflow and clicking still occurred (my room temp is around 24C, open enclosure temp was around 25C). This is where I realized that I don't think my problem is heat creep. The extruder motor was not hot at all when the clicking occurred (so i guess this means that the gears are probably not that hot either. What I did realize was that the printer was at the ironing layer and this is where the clog/clicking started.
Based on the image, I think my nozzle is too close to the print when ironing, especially since the surface near the streak in the bottom right corner is pretty rough. When ironing is off, I can finish the model no problem. Any ideas how to resolve this issue? Again, I want to emphasize that I've never had a clog/gear clicking problem and this has started to happen ONLY when ironing is on.
Ironing settings I've tried:
- Flow 15%, 0.1 spacing, 15 mm/s speed
- Flow 25%-40%, 0.1 spacing, 15 mm/s speed and 20 mm/s speed
Have you opened the idler door and cleaned out any buildup of dust in the Bondtech gears?
Cheerio,
RE: Ironing causes clogging and extruder gears clicking
Yup! I've opened the idler door quite a few times now to check that the gears didn't grind up the filament every time I heard the clicking. Surprisingly there's never been much debris to clean
Ironing is a strange sort of printing; the nozzle is hard against the print causing extra back-pressure while the actual flow rate is minimal. My next guess would be a partial clog, possibly of overcooked filament or some residual higher printing temperature material. Try a cold pull.
Cheerio,
RE: Ironing causes clogging and extruder gears clicking
TLDR Try reducing flow
I've had this and discovered that the extrusion multiplier was the issue. I have set my extrusion multiplier to greater than 1 to allow for high-speed printing close to machine limits. When the printer is ironing, speeds are of course much slower and this resulted in too much filament being extruded. As has already been said, there is lots of back pressure when extruding so close to the existing print surface. Combine that with over extrusion and you overcome the extruders capacity to push out that filament.
I fixed this by reducing the flow on high speed prints.