E-step difficulty

[AbuMaia]

I run mine at 900.

[printbus]

900 to 913 here, depending on the filament. JimG, I'm curious on whether the squeak is still there. Some of us were discussing battling extruder squeaks in a thread a couple of months ago.

[JimG]

Squeak is reduced, but still present at times with PLA. No squeak with ABS. In the previous thread, did you come to a conclusion as to the cause of the squeaking?

Recently experienced 2 more extruder jams with a particular spool of brown PLA. Tightening the guidler and bumping the hot end temp seems to have solved it for now, but I have not done any > 1 hour prints since I made the changes. I am beginning to suspect that this spool of filament could be a big part of the jamming problem.

Jim

[old man emu]

Wow! My extruder feed must have been waaay out. I short changed me 17 mm.

I used the wrong default value in my calculation below (working off the top of my bird brain). If I use the factory default of 841, then the calculated value comes out at 967 steps/100mm. That doesn't sound right when compared to your values.

OME

[printbus]

Squeak is reduced, but still present at times with PLA. No squeak with ABS. In the previous thread, did you come to a conclusion as to the cause of the squeaking?

Recently experienced 2 more extruder jams with a particular spool of brown PLA. Tightening the guidler and bumping the hot end temp seems to have solved it for now, but I have not done any > 1 hour prints since I made the changes. I am beginning to suspect that this spool of filament could be a big part of the jamming problem.

Jim

I don't think we did solve the squeak/creak, and that's why I was asking. It was an ancillary topic in a thread, but I may still try to find it. It came up since I was asked to explain why I had put new bearings in the extruder during my last rebuild, and I answered that it was part of a last ditch, brute force approach to hopefully eliminating the annoying creak mine had. I had taken apart the extruder multiple times trying different things, and using a length of pipe as a listening tube it seemed to be coming from the hobbed bolt/guidler area. Ultimately, somewhere in the combination of new bearings, a new extruder motor, nit picky alignment shims on the hobbed bolt, and using kapton to ensure a snug fit of the hex hot end in the round hole of the extruder base I seem to gotten rid of it.

FOLLOWUP COMMENT: In my case, the creak was not coming from the extruder gears. That was the first assumption I had, but readjusting alignment and even replacing the gears didn't change anything.

Deja vue on the filament stoppage. You could be one that I've already said this to, but it seems like everyone battles that at some point, often with different conclusions on what is happening. In my case it was slight bumps on the filament that must have been just large enough to catch on the top of the hex hot end. I was growing quite frustrated, seeing everything stop printing somewhere within 1-1/2 hrs of starting it. All I'd ever have to do is cut off the end of the filament and re-feed it, but I also kept tearing down the hot end to clean it, etc. Eventually I was just sitting in front of the printer one night pondering what to try next, and I happened to feel a bump when I slid my fingers over the filament between the printer and the spool. Unrolling about 25 ft from the spool, I found about 10 similar bumps - some visually noticeable and some not.

[printbus]

Wow! My extruder feed must have been waaay out. I short changed me 17 mm.

I used the wrong default value in my calculation below (working off the top of my bird brain). If I use the factory default of 841, then the calculated value comes out at 967 steps/100mm. That doesn't sound right when compared to your values.

Been there. I'll bet that if you put in 967 and run another test, you'll get results that say you need something like 800. At least that's what I kept running into. I then followed a suggestion I had read somewhere about never measuring the first lengthy extrusion after heating up the hot end. Doing so has really helped lead to more consistent results in my testing. If you're using Pronterface, others have reported improved consistency in test results by decreasing the settings/options E manual feed rate from the default of 100mm/min.

[printbus]

Some discussion regarding extruder clicks, pops, cracking and creaking came up in this thread, starting at about post #24 - http://3dprintboard.com/showthread.p...-amp-Questions

[JimG]

Thanks for the link. Very informative thread.

My creak is different from the noise I heard on the posted video. Mine is more like a rusty hinge.

My present working theories are 1) the sound of PLA rubbing against the plastic extruder body below the hobbed bolt, and/or 2) the sound of plastic-on-plastic gears.

I am using 3mm filament. In hindsight I wish I had drilled out the extruder body. The print that came with my kit needed some cleanup in most places. But I failed to test fit the filament path.

I'll also mention that I get a lot of white powder (my extruder is white) on the x-axis V-rails. There is a lot of wear going on with the large gear, and perhaps the small gear as well. This explanation for the creaking doesn't seem to explain more noise with PLA than ABS, unless PLA requires more extrusion effort?

Jim

[Stigern]

I had some creak noise, added some ptfe lube on my plastic gears and the sound went away.

[JimG]

I had some creak noise, added some ptfe lube on my plastic gears and the sound went away.

That seems to have also ended my squeaking. Thanks.

Jim