Status of Shapercube build

[Bryce Schroeder]

Hello,

Thanks to the help I have received, my shapercube seems to be coming along. I have completed repairs to the RAMPS and the heated bed is now working. However, I have come across another problem.

The extruder seems to have trouble keeping hold of the filament... I can't seem to find a procedure for determining how tight to make the idler. I think it is too tight, because I see plastic shavings from it grinding on the filament, but if I loosen it much it does not seem to be able to recapture the filament after retracting during the course of printing. It doesn't seem to have any trouble once it gets past the first layer or so, and is laying down a lot of plastic, but going slowly or stop-and-go seems to cause it real problems. I have removed the idler and cleaned the plastic grindings out of the gear which contacts the filament, to no avail.

Although I do not think it is the whole problem, is there any way to reduce the "retract filament to prevent dripping" behavior when the head is moving but not extruding?

I am using slic3r and 230 or 240C extruder temperature.

Any suggestions? Thanks!

[RedoX Ws]

Hi ;)

What kind of filament do you use ? What kind of hotend do you have ? My main problem when I started was the default Sc2.1 hotend wasn't really designed for PLA, now I have a JHead and it works like a charm.... Do you have a fan blowing of the cold part of the hotend ? How does you filament look when you extrude a little bit and reverse it completely ?

The pressure on the filament shouldn't be really tight, only a few scratchs on the filament. If the teeths are making chips, it's definitely too tight.

Retraction shouldn't be a problem, keep it low, 1or 2 mm it should be enough...

You could try to come on the IRC channel ( #shapercube on irc://irc.freenode.org:6667), people are generally giving good advices, even if the answer is not always fast. You could also try on #reprap, but you'll have to explain a little more, with pictures since they don't necessarily know the Sc

Keep up !

[Bryce Schroeder]

I will try to photograph the filament later today. It is a 3.5mm ABS filament. It does indeed make chips and ends up having serrations ground into it by the extruder gear, so I will make it less tight. Although when I do, the filament seems to slip out on retraction, so either I have too much retraction or just haven't found exactly the right tightness.

Thanks