MakerGear Forum

I have spent all day on the M2 V4 extruder and I cannot get the filament to keep extruding, tried ABS/PLA/PETG and nothing, I have taken apart the hotend and looked for clogged material, I have installed new 0.35mm Nozzles. I am at the end of the line here.....

I have taken the nozzle off and extruded material ok, but as soon as I stick the nozzle on, the extruder drive wheel doesn't drive the material at all, just sits there and binds up. I have tighten, loosen, tried every tension that the drive gear could do !!!

HELP !!!!!!!

If multiple nozzles do the same thing, it sounds rather like the heater is at fault. . . could the heater cartridge be loose or something and not getting the nozzle up to temperature? Or a faulty reading on the thermistor (although I have only heard of them going flaky, not reading an offset---although the wrong thermistor specified in the firmware could do that). Hmm. . . do you trust the firmware setup?

I am so lost here too, the printer was printing absolutely perfect, I get I should really look at the firmware setup...... the problem is, don't know what I'm looking for or where to find it.

Is the nozzle hot?

My Fingers think so, been burning them all day long, I did just try and raise the temperature up to like 260C for ABS and it seems like it keeps extruding 100mm at a time, I have never ran ABS this hot before, Is there a setting or like Tim said Firmware discrepancies ?

Still confused ......


Also the Fan seems to be changing RPM a lot, kind of speeding up a down ?

TheRyanRanch wrote:Also the Fan seems to be changing RPM a lot, kind of speeding up a down ?

Possibly a symptom of something. My extruder fan (not the bed fan) does change speed a lot initially, because it's a 12V fan wired in series with the electronics enclosure fan, which means that the fans are supposed to act like a voltage divider, dividing the 24V down to 12V and 12V. But the fans' loads change all the time, so the voltage between them wanders up and down. But that usually settles out after 10-15 seconds after power-up, and they remain steady after that. If the fan is changing speeds all the time, you might have a power supply problem.

jsc wrote:Is the nozzle hot?

Your fingers will be grilled at 260C (I know; I've done it, though on a wire bonding machine, not my 3D printer), and you won't be able to tell the difference between the temperature at which ABS flows properly and the slightly lower temperature at which it gets too viscous and jams up. The question is: are you monitoring the temperature from the host computer, and is the temperature graph showing that the temperature of the hot-end is reaching what you set it to, and holding steady?

We ask because the V4 has different heating characteristics than the V3b. Since I think that the M2 still does not ship with the V4, I assume that you have been previously printing with the V3b and recently ordered and installed the V4. Am I right? If so, you need to go through a PID (Proportional Integral Derivative, in case anyone wanted to know) calibration: The steps you need to do for the calibration, I think, are in the instructions for the V4 installation. The PID calibration sends back to you three numbers which you then plug back into the firmware. If you use the PID numbers from the V3b hot-end with the V4, you are likely to get wild temperature swings, which is exactly the sort of thing that can cause the filament to jam as the temperature drops too low.

Hi Tim, a bunch useful info here, Thank you !

When I ordered my printer, a couple of months ago, I ordered it Assembled, but with the V4 upgrade, so I installed everything, but I do not remember anything about the PID ? it has been printing wonderfully, all of a sudden the happened, so maybe your right, need to PID the damn thing?'

Where do I start?

one of the things i did when i was having problems with hotend clogging, when temerature issues were suspected was to get a hold of a temperature probe and tape the probe onto the hotend and monitor it that way.

harbor freight used to sell a reasonably priced multi meter with a temp probe - think i got it for like 25 bucks.

obviously it is difficult to print like that, but for just testing temperature stability, and doing a comparative measurement to the readings from the rambo board it worked well.

TheRyanRanch wrote:When I ordered my printer, a couple of months ago, I ordered it Assembled, but with the V4 upgrade, so I installed everything, but I do not remember anything about the PID ? it has been printing wonderfully, all of a sudden the happened, so maybe your right, need to PID the damn thing?'

Well, that's additional information, helpful to know that you were previously printing well before things went bad on you. I have not heard of anyone ordering the pre-assembled already with the v4, but I'm sure that MakerGear would not send it to you without at least a reasonable PID setting for the v4 hot-end plugged into the firmware.

If you visually monitor the temperature ramp, then for proper PID settings, the temperature climbs up steadily, overshoots the target temperature by a bit, then slowly drops back to the target temperature. That's called "critically damped" behavior. If it oscillates around the target temperature by a few degrees C, that's underdamped, but not something that's going to cause the extruder to jam. If it's oscillating in wild swings of 10 degrees C or more, then a PID calibration is definitely in order. However, you were printing well for a while, and temperature response behavior doesn't just go completely off the rails suddenly (unless something has broken), so PID calibration is almost certainly not the issue here.

Ok I'm a noob, so I tried running the "M303" in the MCP and I am assuming I run this in Verbose mode? I wasn't real clear on what I'm looking at, I get the 150C cycle, but when can you actually tell this is finished?

Here's what I captured on the screen.
Is this what I need to use to update the PID ?

RECEIVED: bias: 74 d: 74 min: 146.59 max: 153.68
RECEIVED: Ku: 26.56 Tu: 37.22
RECEIVED: Clasic PID
RECEIVED: Kp: 15.94
RECEIVED: Ki: 0.86
RECEIVED: Kd: 74.16
RECEIVED: PID Autotune finished ! Place the Kp, Ki and Kd constants in the configuration.h
RECEIVED: ok
RECEIVED: ok T:150.0 /0.0 B:29.1 /0.0 @:74
RECEIVED: ok T:150.0 /0.0 B:29.1 /0.0 @:74
RECEIVED: ok T:150.0 /0.0 B:29.1 /0.0 @:74
RECEIVED: ok T:150.0 /0.0 B:29.1 /0.0 @:74