Extuder Help

Hello,

A year ago I got into 3D printing for the first time with a Rapide Lite 200. After a few initial successful prints things went wrong. After trouble shooting and breaking down the extruder and rebuilding I still had problems. I let the printer set for a few months and then decided to try again. I decided to go with an entire new extruder, an E3dv6. I had the bracket parts from Thingiverse printed for me and set up a bowden extruder. I am still having problems. The picture shows that the prints start off okay for the first few layers, but then extrusion stops. The extruder motor (now mounted on top) keeps stripping. It seems like it is ether to loose (slipping), or to tight (stripping), I can not get an in between. Do I have this set up right? Is there to much flex in the tubing? I can not figure out how to get a proper filament feed.

Thanks

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I was having a problem for a short period where I didn't realize this but it wasn't extruding enough material. There is a setting in Simplify3d called Extrusion multiplier. Once I changed that from 1.0 to 1.05 (raised it by 5%) everything now works perfect. I actually went up to 1.07 at first, but realized that it was making my parts ever so slightly larger than they were supposed to be.

Try one of those settings. I was thinking my extruder was stripped as well, it just wasn't feeding enough to begin with.

I have had a problem like that in the past. Are you using PLA and is it an all-metal hotend? If so, you could be retracting too far, thus getting rubbery PLA up in the higher part of the heatbreak where it cools and jams. This creates a plug with enough back-pressure to make the extruder chew itself through the filament. As I also had a bowden setup on that printer (and needed a lot of retraction to prevent oozing, thus creating the problem). With ABS the problem also was there, but was much less severe than with PLA. In the end I had to resolve it by replacing the all-metal heatbreak for a ptfe lined one. Once I did that, the problem disapeared.

I was having lots of problems getting any kind of consistency with my printing (CTC, Flashforge Dual clone). I upgraded the extruders replaced the ptfe tubes, lots of cleaning the nozzles, upgraded to an all metal hot end. Sometimes it would print ok, but usually the prints would break up during printing with the filament not sticking the the previous layer, or the extruder would start clicking and failed to pull the filament through.

The one thing that helped most was warming the filament reel up in the oven for a couple of hours to remove the moisture. Not too hot, just warm at maybe 40-50 degrees C, much more than that and PLA will start softening and melting together. Since doing that every so often nearly all my prints now come out nearly perfectly.

I didn't think it would make much difference as the filament wasn't 'sizzling' or 'popping' when coming out of the nozzle but it seems to have fixed my printing problem. Might be worth a try if you haven't already.

you either need a dehumidifer in your room or buy different pla.

My workshop is usually between 45-50% humidity and i have no issues with filament, a lot of it is just left out in the open, and doesn't effect it.

What temp do you print pla at ?

I print PLA at 195 and prints are now coming out very clean. I've printed maybe 15-20 things since and every one has printed fine. Before drying the filament out I would be lucky if 50% printed without any issue and even those that did I would not call perfect.

Not sure on the average humidity here in the UK, at the moment it's around 80-90%.