MakerGear Forum

So, this morning i trying a print, and the extruder stopped working. i know i had the tension screw a bit lax so i stopped the print and figured i would work on it tonight after i got off.
Fast forward to tonight:
I removed the filament and took a look. In Jules post "Setting the Filament Drive Tension Screw" it was the top drawn example. Probably between 5-10%.
So i re-adjusted then wound up at about 30%. Backed off a bit and finally got it about where it needed to be. .41 on the thinwall calibration cube.
I begin a print and it stops extruding by the 4th layer.
I re-tightened back to the 30%(ish) and all was fine until about an hour into the print. Then it hard failed. I cant retract, i cant extrude... Nada. So i thought fine, i have a Jam somewhere or the teeth are clogged. So i popped off the housing, cleaned the teeth. While the assembly was off, i powered on the printer and hit retract and extrude again. Again nothing.
I put the assembly back together, and remove the cover to the Rambo. I checked F2, F3 and F4, all fine.
I am now at a loss on where to go next. Any suggestions appreciated.
I also need to know which color wire is pin 1 on the SD card reader ( i forget to note it before removing the header) The assembly instructions show a different wiring layout.

Wait... Put this on ice for a sec.
I need to check something first... (get it up to temp first.)

I still need the pinout for the sd card though.

The nozzle has to be hot before the extrude and retract command work.....did you heat it up first?

Found the pinout too.
Hopefully you can just delete this post altogether. Fingers crossed.

Sorry for the chicken little.
Please delete this post so i dont embarass myself.

Raddiver wrote:Sorry for the chicken little.
Please delete this post so i dont embarass myself.

Absolutely not....it's a right of passage. (Why should you be the only one to not embarrass yourself with a post....go back about a month or so to catch my most recent offering....)

*Hangs head... Does walk of shame*
Fine.

Ok so the extrude stopping during a print is still happening.
I even changed the filament thinking it might have been that spool/color (hatchbox purple abs @240 btw).
I've got some cleaning filament on the way, but it wont be here until tomorrow.
Aside from soaking the nozzle in acetone (which I've never done before) I'm not sure what to do.

Most common thing is stripping the filament. (Comes from having the filament drive screw tension too tight.)

Any time it stops, retract the filament and look at the end to see what's going on with the filament tension.

Or it could be not printing hot enough (go up by a few degrees at a time) or you are printing too fast and not giving the filament time to melt, so it's jamming.

Also possible that there's a tangle in the spool. or the filament diameter changed (but that last is much rarer now).

So try checking through those things, one at a time.

It could be any of those problems but if it was printing fine for awhile and then just stopped one day it could be a semi clogged nozzle. It can still seem to still extrude ok at the start of the print but if you look at the extruding filament it won't be as thick. The print will start fine then just stop mid way through. This happens to me occasionally when running ABS over time (think it's just the nature of the beast) and soaking the nozzle in acetone usually fixes the problem.

VERY IMPORTANT - If you're going to remove the nozzle make sure you take the hotend out of it's mount or you will snap the barrel.