Underextrusion and grinding filament issue
Hello friends, I'm having a weird issue. I've printed maybe 200 hours on my new mk3s, and everything was going well until my nozzle clogged up. I couldn't manage to clear it, but I had a spare .4 that I bought with it, so I put that one on.
I got 2 good prints, then I started to notice it was underextruding, and I could hear the gear that feeds the filament in clicking and popping.
Now where it gets a little weird is 1. if I unload and reload the filament, it has no trouble pushing a ton of filament through it for the normal "is the right color filament coming out" test. There seems to be no restriction at all, and no popping/clicking from the filament feeding gear. and 2. I can pretty easily put a clog unblocking little needle thing into the nozzle quite a distance, so there seems to be no obstruction there.
Could I have screwed something up with a print setting that would cause this to happen only when printing? Is it possible I have a blockage farther up, maybe in the ptfe tube, that somehow doesn't interfere with the filament autoloading? I don't really want to take the whole extruder apart unless I have to.
RE: Underextrusion and grinding filament issue
Out of desperation I recalibrated absolutely everything, and it seems to be working fine now.
Is it possible that if you print height is too low it can mean the filament won't extrude as much as it's trying to, which will cause the grinding/popping of the extruder gear? I suspect maybe I screwed up the Z alignment when I was trying to clear the initial clog, and that's what messed things up, even after the new nozzle
RE: Underextrusion and grinding filament issue
Yes, if you're too low, it'll block the nozzle and the gears will skip. Rather common with filaments filled with carbon, wood, metal or other particles, but can happen with a normal filament too - only you need to be really low with the normal one.
Plus, this will cause back pressure and the molten filament will flow into the heatbreak, causing further blockages that may then cause issues even later in the print.