If this is the case then I wonder why it doesn't skip steps with colder & slower settings. (After 2 hours it will begin skipping even with those settings)


Originally Posted by Alibert
I have had similar problems in 3 of my printers over the past months after long periods of heavy use. This was the extruder under-extruding (missing steps as I found out) on one printer, and the X or Y stepper missing steps (print suddenly shift several cm in x or y direction) on the the other two.

In all three cases it was the stepper motot cable that needed replacing. Apparently these cables are not up to continuous bending at stress points (cable ties used to fixate them) as the extruder head moves around.....

Replacing the cables with brand new ones resolved the issues in all 3 printers. I now do not use tight cable tie fixing for the cables but allow them to move more freely, preventing development (I hope) of weak spots in the cables.



Interesting! Did you experience clogging as a result of this? And eventually totally clogged, resulting in filament gathering and coiling up inside the print head instead of extruding.

No, I experienced skipped steps in the extruder (not enough plastic pushed out creating holes, bad fills, sometimes no plastic pushed out at all) and skipped steps in the X or Y directions (layers randomly shifting horizontally at random heights into the build).

In the extruder case, it would also happen that for some time the stepper skipped and no plastic was pushed out, and later on it would push out plastic again but into thin air as the underlyiing layer was partially missing giving all kinds of blobs and mess collecting around the nozzle.