Hello everybody. I bought a Comgrow Creality Ender 3 off Amazon about a month ago. I set it up and had quite a few successful prints with it (about seven prints in total, with about four of those comprising an entire chess set), so a combined total of about 80 hours print time with 3 different types of PLA, having basically great results. Was very happy with it.

I switched to a black PLC about a week ago and tried another print, and it did this weird thing where it binded up early on in the print, the x-coordinate seemed to be stuck, so it kept printing in a straight line and eventually binded up and I cancelled the print. I tried to print again the next day (being a newbie), and oddly enough it looked like it was printing correctly for the first layer (took maybe 5 min), then the second layer was offset by maybe half an inch in the positive-x direction, and the next layer was another half inch in the positive x-direction, and so I cancelled that print too. I knew something was up at this point, that it wasn't just the black PLA but was an issue with the geometry of my print setup.

I have not made any changes since then, but the issue now is that if I go through the Prepare menu and try to move along the x-axis in 0.1mm, 1mm, or 10mm increments (doesn't matter), the x-axis motor has like a mini-seizure where it sounds like it is trying to move but does not. Z and Y axes work fine.

I did a bit of research / watched a few videos, and as a result I switched the connectors (motor connector and limit switch) from the Y-axis motor to the X-axis motor. Alas, the x-axis motor worked perfectly. So in case I didn't explain that well, the x-axis motor connected to the x-axis connector would not work (was seized up). However, when I connected the Y-axis connector to the x-axis motor, the x-axis motor worked great.

This seems to tell me that the issue is in wiring and/or the motherboard of the printer. This is pretty disappointing since I have only had it for around a month, but I do know these printers are finnicky and at the price, what do you expect. So I feel like my next step would be to connect the X-connector to the Y-motor and see if the Y-motor will then seize / jam, but at this point I assume it would. After that I might test the continuity on the wire connectors, but beyond these steps I would be lost to any further troubleshooting / solutions.

Does anyone have any ideas or steps I might be able to take to fix this issue? This was a really, really sweet printer and I don't mind putting in a bit of work on it so long as I can get it up and running again.

Thanks all, happy printing!

C