Broken Motor shaft on extruder

[kentd]

I was in the middle of printing a part today and my extruder motor quit on me..
I took the motor apart and discovered that the shaft on the motor snapped off the motor. ( See photo below )

Also in the process it looks like it may have blown something on my main board on the machine because when I tried to do a manual jog on that motor the main shaft doesn't move. I tried moving it to my X-axis just for testing and the motor does turn on when I jog it from there.
So that is why I am coming to the conclusion that when the motor originally jammed up that it may have caused something on the main board to burn out.

Questions:

Is this common for the extruder motors to fail?

Are there any higher quality motors out there as replacements?

Am I correct that I probably burn something out on the main board since that circuit isn't working anymore?
is there something else that I can check?

If the board is bad I'm hoping it's not going to set me back $$$ to bad...

I'm kind of in a bind now since Makergear is out of stock on these motors.

Thanks,

Kent

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[jimc]

kent, couple things......did you actually check with makergear on the motor or are you going by their website? their website will always say out of stock. you will need to email karen or support to get a new motor. im sure they are not out of stock. i have never seen a motor shaft break like that. no one that i know of has ever complained about it or posted a pic on the forum. i would say it is not a common occurrence. its more common for the pinion gear to wear and strip out. its a kysan motor which is decent. they are not low grade motors. as for the rambo burning out, i have no idea. you would need to contact support to find out. it is a different motor than the x and y so it could be that there are different voltage requirements for the extruder motor. switching may or may not mean anything but honestly i am only guessing.

[Tim]

It is relatively easy to switch from extruder 0 to extruder 1 on the RAMBo, if the motor driver for extruder 0 is really dead. You can possibly get by in the software by just enabling extruder 1 all the time, or else it's a somewhat more involved task to change a couple of pinout numbers in the firmware configuration file to convince the firmware that the extruders have been swapped. If you don't intend to use a dual extruder, then making use of the 2nd extruder channel is cheaper than buying a new RAMBo.

[kentd]

Thanks for the info Guys....

It turns out that my board was fine....
Josh in tech support told me that the firmware has some safety settings which won't allow the extruder motor to turn on till the extruder temp is up to 170c, so I re-tested the motor once I got the temp up it did rotate... so that's good news.

So once I replace the motor I should be back in business.

[insta]

That's, uh, that's quite a thing you did there, Kent

[chad]

That's a really odd failure considering that during normal operation there is no lateral stress on that shaft. Also the stepper doesn't have anywhere enough torque to twist that off. It must be some sort of metallurgical anomaly from when the stock was forged prior to machining.
Crazy, that's a new one.

chad