Extruder grinding / bad printings

Make sure that the idler wheel is very tight against the filament (if you can't see the idler wheel moving you are not getting a tight grip on the filament) as you can tighten it more than most person's would normally think, just be somewhat cautious of cracking the acrylic or you may have to give the printed part I made a try.  Make sure you are using a hot enough temp.  200 is more than enough.  I use 190-195 normally as per my thermistor.  210 for clearing clogs and don't go higher than that.

done thank you.

the links are in the first post.

A clog is the most likely culprit here.  However, I have encountered one other thing that can cause this behavior.  If your bed is not level, or you have your Z adjusted too close to the extruder head, it can jam up while trying to extrude. 

A good indication is if you have the extruder high above the bed, and manually extruding works fine.  Then when you start printing, the extruder starts slipping and clicking.  If it only does it in one particular area of your bed, you have a level issue.

Remember that a torpedo level is not going to give you a true representation of the bed level.  The actual level can be affected by a work surface that the printer is sitting on, or the floor, ect.  What really matters is the bed level in direct relation to the level of the extruder itself.

If you have a digital level, lay it on top of the extruder to get a measurement.  Then lay it on the bed and level the bed to the same angle of the extruder.  You can do this with a bubble level too.. you'll just have to eyeball it.

Ian also has a dial indicator that attaches to the extruder, which serves the same purpose.  It measures the distance between the extruder and the bed for leveling purposes.

you'll find it impossible to do whilst cold.
heat the machine up to "printing temperature" (at least 170)
poke the guitar string in from the bottom.

depending on how serious the clog is this may fix it. (my machine has clogged about 8 times in the past month or so.

if this doesn't clear the clog you'll need to take the nozzle off the printer (again do this at "printing Temperature" -trying to do it cold leads to problems since the plastic is pretty firmly attached to both the nozzle and the barrel, -trying to separate them means trying to shear a 3/4mm rod of solid ABS. - this could be why so many people are breaking their barrels!)

once you have the nozzle off you can look at it from the top side down.

you'll probably see a large crusty mess of brittle burned heat denatured plastic. either burn with a torch, dissolve in acetone a mixture of both, drill or scrape out the bits of plastic.

then return the nozzle and keep printing.

on my machine when I had to do this I found quite a thick layer or plastic, and that the poking a wire through the tip was getting less and less effective...
so if you find clearing a clog with a wire is becoming ineffective it probably means that you need to strip and rebuild your hot end cleaning it properly, (or replace the nozzle).
I imagine that everyone will experience a giant clog eventually since clearing with wire really only pushes the bit that's too hard to extrude back into the nozzle to come back and cause a problem later.

OK, Thank you.

I hope i'll be able to do it without all the burning thing !

What is strange is that I had the problem straight out of the box and then 2 days later again. I don't remember if I have left the extruder at high temprature during the 2 days (that's possible) but that doesn't explain the problem occuring at the very beginning ...

Jean

You would want to use a .35 mm drill bit or smaller. .35mm should be the correct size.

If you end up trying this please post your results. That would save a bit of time if you get a clog.

You can still print with the filament curling.  Mine does that most of the time too.  Since you're extruder will be right over the previous layer you won't be curling material out.  Unless you're doing overhangs or bridging you probably won't notice it.  Support is going to tell you the same thing that we have unfortunately.

1)Temp sensor is usually attached with ~6mm kapton tape to the nozzle. Are you sure you saw a glue?

2) On the solidoodle electronics board, there should be 4 stepper motor boards. You will know what they are because they are four boards that plug into the main electronics board.  One of them should be next to a connector of wires that say "E" and which go to the extruder motor.  Take a voltmeter and measure the voltage with the red probe on the metal potentiometer of the board, and the black probe to any ground you can find.
   If you do this, post what voltage you get. the voltage determine the current limit of your extruder motor. Your extruder motor could also be skipping not because things are clogged, but if it was set too weak. This is very unlikely, but at this point might be worth double checking. Once you post back this, I can try to find what the default voltage should be set to.

3) So you are saying, you cleaned with the very small drill bit, but this did not help? Today I had a clogged nozzle, and I cleaned with a wire, then I extruded 200mm of filament through, cleaned again, and then I extruded another 200mm. It seems to have fixed my situation. My nozzle was getting clogged because I had the bed *too* low. There is a sweet spot where it must be low in order to stick, but not too low (if it's too low, it jams.)

*General tip, when using wire. In my case I could only find .3" nichrome wire. It is not as strong as steel wire.  I had problems with the wire when inserting into the nozzle. The solution is to take pliers, and only allow <1mm of the wire to stick out. Feed this in. Then, adjust the pliers and move the next bit of wire. Do this for a little, and then the rest should slide up the nozzle. The short bit of wire allows for the wire to go in without buckling/bending.

Glad you got it working again, and you are correct that you will need to adjust your z stop height again since you took it apart and put it back together.