Extruder jamming with blue PLA

[jimc]

well im not really sure what you have tried so far but two things come to mind. one is the temp. different color filaments can require different extrusion temps. generally pla will run about 220. use that as mid point. if your blue pla is jamming then temp could be too low. second thing...are you sure its not the z-height? if the gap is a little too tight then there will be too much pressure for it to extrude. what you are describing sounds exactly like your printing too close to the bed OR the bed isnt level and when the print gets over to the high side of the bed the gap is too tight and it jams up. when you get a jam its not uncommon for the filament to not retract. just take the 3 screws out holding the fil drive on. the filament is usually deformed a little right around the bearing area and it cant go into or out of the hole on top or bottom. also how tight is the tension screw on the drive? with the makergear drive you can have it tightened all the way without too many issues. with rsilvers drive if you have it too tight you'll squish the crap out of the filament making it not round so it cant feed properly. the silvers drive just keep half way. maybe a 1/16" gap at the top edge. for the motor mount, the stock makergear one is made of abs. its very low infill though. if you print another then it should be done in abs as well not pla. also bump the infill up to 80-100% or so. in the mean time you can take some acetone and solvent bond it back together long enough to print another.

[Merad]

Well, I still don't know what the actual problem was, but I switched back to our original filament guide housing and right now it's working ok. I was able to do the full z bed leveling print and right now it is about 30 minutes into another print.

Re temp: So far our pla has been printing well with a first layer temp of 215 and dropping to 205 after. Any higher and I start to see stringing between parts. On the print that I mentioned in my last power when the slipping started I did push the temp up to 225 and then 240, and it didn't make a difference.

And Z height: I have been leveling the bed so that a folded piece of copy paper has just a tiny bit of resistance between the nozzle and glass. There is small but visible gap at all four leveling points.

[jimc]

do yourself a favor and get a set of feeler gauges to level the bed and set the z-height. while paper can work, there is no real standard to it. you have no idea what the actual measurement is for the gap. all paper is different thicknesses. if your printing ok now with the makergear filament drive then i would say maybe you had the tension real tight and you were flattening out the filament so it would not go through the hole on silvers drive.

[Capt. John]

1. make sure to run right size drill down thru a new printed out drive
2. check the newly printed drive does not have a small flashed over edge, had to trim this with Xacto before
3. nasty, dirty filament, makes no difference, bad is bad, had to return bad filament to Amazon seller
4. feeler gauges removes all the mystery. .006 nozzle clearance performs well for me (thanks jimc!)
5. clean the teeth on the extruder drive gear, make double sure tiny allen set screw that holds the gear is tight with Loctite.
6. a too close to the bed dragging nozzle is more heat to the top motor, then my top motor drive housing cracked
7. probe down thru the drive to the hot end to make sure it's aligned properly (clear path), had issues with hot end not being in far enough
8. roller bearing in drive? had to trim out the sides to have the roll freely.

The above is some of the stuff I've learned as a newbie, now I've moved up to a rank amateur