Printer Failing To Print
Vella Massart
I have a Ultimaker 3 extended and I am printing using ABS. Once I start the print like normal it usually lets out some of the filament off to the corner. But after a few minutes I come back and see that the filament is stuck on the nozzle blocking the printer from printing. Any idea why this is happening?
90% of the time if it isn't sticking at all then you probably aren't leveling right. While it prints the bottom row push up and then down on the bed to see if either improve things. It may look like the filament is touching the bed but what you describe sounds like the filament is just barely above the bed. YOu want it will squished into the bed.
For ABS you want the bed at about 110C. ABS starts to get soft at 99C and you need to be above that temp for the first mm or so of your print. Otherwise the corners are more likely to warp up off the bed.
ABS is tricky - glue stick is probably not enough unless you wet a tissue and spread it around thin. Look up "abs glue" and make some or use hairspray (google it for 3d printing) or use magigoo (probably best option). Also make sure to clean off all the oils. I clean my beds about once every 200 prints or so removing all glue and oils (oils from my fingers) to get a fresh start.
That all helps the first layer but to keep the print on the bed throughout you may also need rounded corners. If you absolutely can't modify your model to have rounded corners then select the brim option in cura. Even with rounded corners, brim helps even more to hold down the corners onto the bed.
But maybe you could find other materials that have similar or sufficient characteristics, and that print better, with less warping and better bonding, and better layer-adhesion too? For example if the model would needs a little bit of flexibility and enough heat-resistance to sit in a car in the sun, then PET or similar materials might work? (Although they can not be painted and glued so easily as ABS, so that would be a good reason for choosing ABS.)
Stringing seems to happen between the printed parts and there appears to be blobs everywhere.
For the stringing part most tips would be to change speed settings, but since I bought Prusament I think this should not be the main problem, because of settings in Slicer made by pros.
And since the printer works very well with PLA I did not dare to remove any parts of the printer without reason right now.
PETG and PLA quite often need a slightly different live Z value. Basically run live z for a 75mm square and note down the live z value. Then re-slice the 75mm square for petg and adjust live z to get the same squished but not too squished lines. Usually the nozzle needs to be a bit further away from the bed for petg. Once you know your offset for petg you can just adjust the live z before printing in petg.
You can use electric oven, many people use food dehydrators, expensive filament driers are available too. Now as for time and temperature... that's a topic on its own. You will find many recommendations... 70 degrees Celsius for 6 hours, 65 for 2 hours, 55 overnight. This is big discussion thread as an example -prusa-i3-mk3s-mk3-general-discussion-announcements-and-releases/drying-times-and-temps-in-dehydrator/ there are videos from known youtubers and howto articles to get the basics. I shot from the hip, tossed it into cheap dehydrator with temperature knob and cut out grates for 4 hours at around 65 degrees (though I think my unit underperforms and it'smore like 55) and it was waaaaay better than initially. Much less stringing and barely any blobs.
One observation. This won't fix your problem but will prevent another. It appears you are printing PETG directly on a smooth plate. You will ruin your plate this way (PETG sticks too well and will rip the surface off when you try to remove the part). Use either a textured (powder coated) plate or apply gluestick to the smooth plate.
Do you have the filament sensor and if so does the filament move smoothly through it? It looks like inconsistent extrusion and I would check the tension on the extruder gear as well as make sure the spool and filament sensor are not creating too much friction upstream of it. Do you hear any clicking sounds during the print while it is misbehaving?
You can try, but I am not sure dessicant in and of itself will be able to suck up water from filament. Baking filament for few hours at 55-65 degrees looks to be most efficient way, even better than vacuum drying.
Same problem as earlier. First layers looks really nice and then 2 or 3 layer of the infill get messed up. Trying another type of infill patter now and lower the speed from 100 to 95. Hoping for the best.
Got my first successful print with PETG. End result really nice. Changes in the setting for me was needed to go down in speed to 95 then 93 and increase infill from 15% to 20% and change infill pattern from gyroid to 3D Honeycomb.
PETG does not like bridging very much. Turn on bridging detection for gaps in Print settings, and use denser infill, 20% and more. Also, first layer after infill is somewhat sacrificial, it is not uncommon for it to look bad, then it gets covered by solid infill. Don't worry about it very much as long as upper layers look better. One of the reasons you have 5 top layers by default.
3D printers are seriously cool, but as of right now, they are new technology and pretty unreliable. I have a year of 3D printing experience, and I have tried and failed again and again trying to print various models on my printer. However, after failing that many times I have learn a thing or two about settings and tricks to get 3D prints right the first time. If you have any questions, ask away in the comments, and please vote for me if this is helpful!
This is probably one of the most common ways any 3D print can fail. 3D printers work by building up objects layer by layer, and if the layers come off of the bed, you usually end up with plastic spaghetti instead of a clean printed part.
Another common fail is over extrusion. Over extrusion happens when your 3D printer pushes out too much plastic too fast, causing a jam in the end of the nozzle. This jam builds up more and more until the hotend stops extruding altogether, leaving your print unfinished.
The best way to stop under extrusion is checking you nozzle for clogs, and increasing the hot end temperature. I suggest increasing it in five degree increments until you get a part that has good strength and good nozzle flow.
Take a piece of letter paper, normal weight, and fold it in half. Place it under your 3D printers' nozzle and home the hotend onto the paper. The paper should be sandwiched between the bed and nozzle. Now, try to slide it out from under the nozzle. If the paper moves freely, the nozzle is too high above the print bed. If there is too much resistance (you have to pull firmly on the paper to free it), the nozzle is too close to the print bed.
I recently bought a Prusa MK3S and assembled it very slowly and double checking every single step. Printer worked great. After about a week I had a jam in the PTFE tube. I disassembled the hot end, heated it up, and pulled the filament out of the PTFE tube. Recalibrated and everything worked okay.
Had another jam. Did the same fix, recalibrated, but now all my prints fail. I tried printing gear cubes in PLA three times and they fail at about the same place. The first print shows the failed print. The second shows the same with a previous print below it with different infill. Both stopped printing at about the same place. The third pic shows how the filament is ground away against the gears and has no traction to extrude. If I heat it up I can unload the filament so there's no jam.
I have tried both loosening and tightening the idler assembly and got the same results. In the last picture of the keychains I tried lowering the speeds and dropped the print temperature but it still comes out terrible. PLA Filament came with the printer and previously worked great and is less than a month old. Any ideas? Please help!
I had a similar problem with some miniature garbage cans that I wanted to use for tabletop gaming. I got the model off thingiverse, and they had very thin walls (needed to have thin wall detection turned on in the slicer or it missed parts of the walls) and the wall design involved a lot of retraction at certain heights. It would consistently under-extrude at the retraction-heavy layers, assuming it didn't just jam entirely. I had the same issue with other prints, but more randomly - this garbage can mini was the one that was 100% consistent with problems.
It was also the only print I found that failed with PETG. Other than that one model, I generally found PETG was less sensitive to the heatbreak issue because of its higher melting point temperature, so if you have any PETG filament, give that a try and see if you have less trouble. Just be aware that even it can have this same problem with a slow enough flow rate (models with very thing walls or geometry causing slower feeds) and retractions. Some people have had success by lowering or disabling retractions. I never actually tried that myself; I wanted to fix the issue, not just find a workaround.
Anyway, when the print jammed at that layer of the garbage can model, if I was nearby and could quickly unload the filament before the jam got too bad to prevent easy unloading, I'd find that 2.2 mm bulb that Tim described, an indication of the heatbreak issue being the cause. If you want more details, the heatbreak issue is fully described in a thread started by Antimix, and Tim (and others) go into a lot of detail about the causes in that thread. The symptoms they identified matched my experience, so I was pretty confident that it was causing my issues with this model as well as others. So I went ahead and replaced the heatbreak with a standard E3D version (my notes on that process are in this thread) and printed the garbage can perfectly the first time with PLA in the new heatbreak.
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