Replicator extruding inconsistently

[Dan Bowen]

Hey all,
I came in to the space today and noticed the replicator running a job, which was a giant ball of spahgetti. I stopped it and threw out the debris.

I have been trying to print a job all afternoon, however the extruder is continually failing to extrude consistently. I updated the firmware and cleaned the stepper drive wheel and made sure it passes filament smoothly by hand, but that's about all I know how to do.

Any thoughts?

Also I noticed that the printers and the filaments are getting dusty - this is bad.

[Brad Luyster]

Which extruder on which makerbot?

[Joseph]

Folks with more experience can say better, but I spent the weekend troubleshooting the same problem with the Science Center's machine. 

 

Aside from cleaning the knurled wheel, I found that the plastic piece that pushes the filament against the wheel gets grooves worn into it. Rotate it such that the filament isn't sitting in one of those grooves. This worked for me. I suppose you could try adding washers to that piece to make it push harder as well. 

If the wheel is feeding the filament, but not extruding (correctly), take off the nozzle and see if it comes through. If it does, soak the nozzle in some acetone. It doesn't make sense to me that ABS couldn't just be melted and pushed through, but I guess it's possible dust could be building up in there creating some non-meltable blockage. Again, this worked for me, but I defer to those more experienced. 

Joseph

[2600]

Acetone may work quite well enough. The traditional high-efficiency solvent for styrene plastics like ABS would be toluene. Nasty, but effective. 

73

[Christopher Cprek]

I took a look at this last night and the platform was fairly unlevel.
This was certainly causing problems with filament sticking to the
platform and spaghetifcation of prints.

Joseph is right on about the Delrin plungers. Our Makerbots are
getting so heavily used that they are wearing grooves in the plungers.
The Delrin plungers have been out of stock from Makerbot for more than
a month now. Rotating them will help. Adding more washers to increase
the tension will probably just increase the wear. However, I will say
that yesterday I was able to extrude with no problems at all. Not sure
if someone already rotated the plungers. I'm keeping an eye out for
replacement plungers once they are available.

One issue that has come up. When Dan upgraded the firmware, it's
causing problems for all existing s3g files generated from
replicatorg. The Replicator now complains that print quality will be
inconsistent unless it's an x3g file, which is the format generated by
MakerWare (not replicatorg to my knowledge). It will display this
warning instead of any progress meter. I was able to print my s3g
files despite the warning, but it surely is an annoyance.

Chris

[stea...@gmail.com]

Interesting, I leveled the platform several times due to the upward bulge in the middle.

The 7.0 update info said that replicatorG 040 and the latest maker ware will export the new file format, and it's possible to downgrade using the same process if necessary.

Thanks,
Dan


Sent from my iPhone

[Christopher Cprek]

One trick to leveling the Replicator's build platform is to preheat it
first *before* leveling. If you try leveling an unheated platform, it
will be off quite a bit because the heat expansion.

I'll look at my options on replicatorg 0040 to see if x3g is on there,
but unselected. I'd like to avoid downgrading. It wasn't a
showstopper, just kind of annoying to have that message.

Chris