Give it some slack!

I notice that someone else had had the problem of prints failing because the filament was not feeding easily (http://3dprintboard.com/showthread.p...-(-please-help )

I struck this problem while printing this: http://3dprintboard.com/showthread.p...ate-*-stl-file

I realised that the hobbed bolt in the extruder is OK for feeding filament into the extruder itself, but is terribly strong when it comes to pulling filament off the spool.

My solution to this is to check how much filament is expected to be used for the print, and pulling this much off spool before starting the print.

Old Man Emu

I had an odd thing happen this week. While printing a piece on a spool that was almost empty, I heard a loud snap and when I looked at the printer, I saw that the filament had snapped off about 4" above the extruder? Not wanting to loose the print, I fed in the broken end when the filament got into the extruder and saved the print. This was my very first filament break in 4 years of printing.