Layer skips and occasional clicking extruder: Extruder motor bearing broken!
Hi,
this is actually not a help request but a quick tip for anyone who has to go through the same ordeal as me. After a few years, my MK3 all of the sudden started showing layer skips or poor adhesion on some layers mid print. But this was not really repeatable, sometimes the prints would turn out fine.
After searching the forums I found a lot of posts that described the same issue. I fiddled with the extruder, tried all kinds of filaments, swapped the nozzle cleaned everything and eventually even swapped the complete hot end for a dragon one to eliminate heat creep. Nothing helped.
The root cause of the issue was a broken bearing in the extruder motor. It would turn fine until the broken ball would jam up. This can be easily diagnosed by removing the extruder motor and turning the axis by hand. If there is resistance at a certain point, simply exchange the bearing or the motor and everything is fine again.
I just wanted to post this here, since I didn't find this hint in the forum when I was searching last year. Happy printing!