Makerbot 5th Gen Printing issue

[DssBB]

We recently purchased a MakerBot 5th Gen printer for use in one of our lab assignments. The students have drawn up some small windmill or turbine blades which I am going to be printing. I have made about 6 attempts to print the 3 blades which are approximately 1 1/4" h x 7" long and about 1/8" thick from the spool of white PLA which came with the printer. I have ran several profiles including some custom settings without any luck. I switched filament over to a spool of green we also purchased with the printer and the parts have successfully printed. I am assuming that the different colors based on the pigment used to produce them may require different settings to be able to successfully print the parts.
At this point in time, I am fine with printing the blades in green.
A problem which has puzzled me from my initial printing of the 3 blades is that one blade regardless of the amount of infill I select or the number of shells, always prints one of the 3 blades hollow or without any inside support.
A single blade was drawn up in Siemens NX and arrayed with a 1 inch space between each of the 3 blades which was then opened in MakerBot's software and the printed file generated. The 3 blades in the print file are all identical although one blade continually is printed completely hollow.
The MakerBot 5th gen is running the latest firmware and I am using the latest software. I have also printed the 3 blades rotated at 0 and at 90 deg to rule out a misalignment of the printer or print platform which I have levelled several times.
Too rule out the extruder, I purchased 3 spare extruders as well with the printer and have tried 3 different extruders with the same results.
Would anyone have any insight or suggestions to try as too why the printer continually prints one blade hollow and the other 2 with internal support?

[richardphat]

The author has pointed out important hardware faulty and some that are related to firmware/software. I would not be suprise if the problems leads to the slicer.
http://3dprintboard.com/showthread.p...ead-with-Rep-2

However, could you attach a cad files so some of us can have a look?

[DssBB]

I have the cad files on my laptop at work and I'll gladly put them up on Monday morning although I cannot see how a part produced in NX and then arrayed in NX would be different. The two arrayed (copied) parts would be identical.
I also weighed the 3 blades produced as well on a grain scale I have. 2 of the blades weigh 156 and 157 grains. The 3rd blade weighs only 116 grains. The loss of 40 grains in the one part along with it's structural integrity will be an issue when the students attach their blades to the model wind turbines and begin analyzing them in our wind chamber.
As I had mentioned, I am running the latest firmware on my 5th gen printer and if the problem is somewhat related, would it be advisable to install an older version of the firmware ( if there is a better version) although that may also introduce some other issues which have since been resolved with the latest version.

[richardphat]

Since, I use Catia and Solidworks, can you attach the STL or STEP file instead?
I'll try to use cura and slic3r and see how they will work out. I used to print turbine and compressor blade so I might have something to share.

[jfkansas]

I would think a blade shouldn't have any infill, you might be better off just printing 100% infill. The blade can be pretty thin and at some point the floors and roofs are thick enough to negate any infilling.

[American 3D Printing]

Too rule out the extruder, I purchased 3 spare extruder...

Holy mackerel! That's a lot of coin! We don't have any more than 1 spare extruder for any of our machines. Basically we keep one spare, and if something goes wrong, we swap in the spare and then repair the one that had an issue.

I'm with the others here, please post your model up on thingiverse or somewhere where we can have a look at them. We've got makerware 2.2, 2.4 as well as Makerbot for Desktop v3.x, so we might be able to see how it is slicing differently.