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The instructions say to hold the "extruder lever" while pushing filament, but there's no lever anywhere near the extruder, and the picture shows part of some other machine! I've tried pushing the filament til it stops, but that doesn't do it. Apparently there is something else I need to do, but the picture and description in the manual are no help. There seem to be no visibly moving parts in that area. :(
The extruder gears are under spring tension to enable the gears to grip the filament.
The lever will be on one side and either pushing it in or pulling it out will relieve the tension on the extruder gears while you push the filament in past the gears.
Cutting the end of the filament at an angle also usually helps.
I've tried pushing, pulling, squeezing, and twisting every part around that area in every direction. Nothing moves!
Well, after trying just pushing the filament in for a while because there's no lever anywhere, I tried to pull it back out, and it wouldn't come back out that way either. So I figured if it's stuck enough for that, maybe the gears finally grabbed it from just being pushed enough.
So I tried starting a print job while just pushing the filament to see if it the gears would finally start pulling it through while hot and under pressure. And it sort-of worked. While I was pushing, plastic would come out and get deposited on the bed. But it wasn't enough to get the flow going by itself like it's supposed to; it would stop as soon as I wasn't pushing anymore. So it still looks like this won't work until I magically conjure up a way to get the gears in there to open, let filament in, then close... which is exactly the problem because there's no way to do that. :mad:
At least this time it let me pull the filament back out. Now there's about an inch at the end that's been pinched/stretched narrower than the rest. So I can see that that's how far in it got without starting to get pulled through on its own, but that doesn't seem to tell me anything I can use to get it to start getting pulled through on its own.
The machine might be fine, but nothing about the instructions tell me anything that makes it usable. The instructions might be fine, but only for some other machine. How in the world can Creality put out a machine like this and instructions like this together?! :mad: :mad: :mad: (And yes, this is both the paper booklet that came with the machine and the PDF downloaded from Creality's website. They're the same.)
Solved!
The "extruder lever" is present on the machine, but just nowhere near the extruder. :rolleyes: I was looking at & all around the hot end, but the lever was part of another mechanism at the back of the machine, right next to the spool holder. It never occurred to me to even look so far away. At that location, it's pushing filament into the far end of the tube instead of pulling it at the business end.
Strange design. If I were to get down to the end of a spool, there's more than a foot of filament that I wouldn't get to use because it would be stuck in the tube. Oh well. At least now I'm printing.