M2's repeatedly stop extrusion mid-print
Posted: Thu Apr 21, 2022 7:32 pm
Apologies if this is has been resolved a hundred times over. I did spend a bit of time digging on the forums and found some related posts, but nothing that seemed to directly address my issue. I am curious to get others' feedback and experience. Feel free to redirect me.
I work at a university and have been an M2 champion for almost a decade. Between our makerspaces we have 10 M2's. We performed various upgrades to them over the years and I think we're all running v4 hotends, latest firmware, BuildTak flex plates, LCD's, etc. I still like our M2's better than some of our other, newer printers and find that in general they are more reliable and produce better prints than other printers. So I am a believer. But we have been facing an issue now for several years that is frustrating and I'm at a point where I need to ask the community for help.
Seemingly randomly we have prints that fail due to the printer simply stopping extrusion mid-print. The printer keeps moving, the extruder motor keeps rotating, but filament ceases to extrude. I print only Overture brand PLA (the other makerspace prints mostly ABS, but I am not aware of the brand). I have tried increasing and decreasing tensions after following Jules's helpful guide viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2694. Unfortunately, that did not resolve the issue. I feel confident we have the proper tension dialed in and we can usually print for several weeks without issue. But eventually, prints begin to fail due to mid-print halt of extrusion again. It seems the only consistent thing we have found to correct the issue is to install a fresh filament drive. We typically print our filament drives out of ABS or PETG. Our machine shop has even go so far as to machine little Delrin inserts to place in the top of the filament drive to guide filament and hopefully reduce wear on the filament entry point. But to no avail.
Does anyone else experience what I am dubbing "filament drives wearing out" as often as we are experiencing? Are there other things that I should be checking here? Thanks for your consideration.
These are two other, similar threads I came upon, but I didn't come away with any solutsion from them I hadn't already tried:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=6466&p=35828&hilit= ... ing#p35828
https://forum.makergear.com/viewtopic.p ... 9338051475
I work at a university and have been an M2 champion for almost a decade. Between our makerspaces we have 10 M2's. We performed various upgrades to them over the years and I think we're all running v4 hotends, latest firmware, BuildTak flex plates, LCD's, etc. I still like our M2's better than some of our other, newer printers and find that in general they are more reliable and produce better prints than other printers. So I am a believer. But we have been facing an issue now for several years that is frustrating and I'm at a point where I need to ask the community for help.
Seemingly randomly we have prints that fail due to the printer simply stopping extrusion mid-print. The printer keeps moving, the extruder motor keeps rotating, but filament ceases to extrude. I print only Overture brand PLA (the other makerspace prints mostly ABS, but I am not aware of the brand). I have tried increasing and decreasing tensions after following Jules's helpful guide viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2694. Unfortunately, that did not resolve the issue. I feel confident we have the proper tension dialed in and we can usually print for several weeks without issue. But eventually, prints begin to fail due to mid-print halt of extrusion again. It seems the only consistent thing we have found to correct the issue is to install a fresh filament drive. We typically print our filament drives out of ABS or PETG. Our machine shop has even go so far as to machine little Delrin inserts to place in the top of the filament drive to guide filament and hopefully reduce wear on the filament entry point. But to no avail.
Does anyone else experience what I am dubbing "filament drives wearing out" as often as we are experiencing? Are there other things that I should be checking here? Thanks for your consideration.
These are two other, similar threads I came upon, but I didn't come away with any solutsion from them I hadn't already tried:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=6466&p=35828&hilit= ... ing#p35828
https://forum.makergear.com/viewtopic.p ... 9338051475