Da Vinci Junior 1.0 heartache (Page 1 of 2)

To start with, yes you made a big mistake!

Now with that out of the way. Are you sure your filament stepper motor is feeding the filament correctly? Seems if the printer was working fine then all of the sudden after have issues with the stepper motor you are having printing problems it would be related to stepper motor. Do you hear any noises while you are printing?

That's frustrating. I bought it cheap because it was supposedly a great beginners printer. :-(

So, moving forward... am I likely to be continuously having problems? Should I be looking to replace it with an ANETBi8, for example?

Yes, the are noises from the feeder sometimes, like it's jumping. They seem to have stopped since I cleaned the feeder and increased the offset. I can get two sheets of paper in there with very little resistance.

I can't tell if it's the right temperature. It shows 201 on the monitor, but for all I know that could be lying!

If I run the system with the Bowden (?) not plugged into the extruder, it's moving back and forth happily, no clicking or anything. The gears move when the filament doesn't, when I get gaps though. I heard a thump once and it suddenly carried on printing, then started acting up again.

I don't know what other tests I can do on the feeder?

Thanks, I've bookmarked the cleaning video to try tomorrow as it's about 4am here.

With that replacement unit, presumably I have to remove all the stuff that's there already, including the horribly fragile 3-wire cable and board... any idea what connectors that is so I can get some spare? I don't think it will survive much pulling around!

I think the motor itself is probably ok, as it moves when required as far as I can tell. Whether the gears are crap or there's a blockage, or even friction somewhere there shouldn't be, I don't know how to test.... yet...

I believe the filament sensor is in the extruder case. I replaced mine and had no issues at all. The only thing I wired up was the stepper motor.

Cough! Cough! Here I am.

I think there are two test you need to do to find out it is your extruder problem or you have hotend clog. Run a test print, and manually push the filament into the extruder with mild force during printing and see if you can get good extrusion from the hotend. If yes, your extruder motor wire is not connected solid and you need to remake the JST connector. If you have this issue, motor will run as you want to, but don't provide enough touch and it reverse its direction when rotation is block by force. To test this hypothesis, you can use some soft tools to block the rotation of the motor gear and see if it reverse the direction.

If it don't reverse the direction, then the spring that hold the encoder is not working or encoder gear and motor gear is not aligned correctly. Give you mess with the motor gear recently, I think this might be more likely what is happened. Assemble the extruder as much as possible and load a filament while align the motor gear, this will help to align the filament in the middle of the encoder gear and motor gear. They need to push against each other to push the filament forward. with miss alignment, it will work fine when not resistance in filament but will stop feed filament when there are small resistance.

If manual push does not help, then you have partial clogged hotend, replace the hotend throat and nozzle will fix the issue.

Da vinci Jr. 1.0 is not a plug and play 3D printer, it use high quality parts but is not assembled in a problem free manner. Its overall experience is much better than Da vinci 1.0 (first generation product)  and not as good as Da vinci miniMaker (3rd generation product). It can be a reliable high quality printer if you did all the mod right, but I would not recommend it for beginners.

With that said, Da vinci Jr. 1.0 is still way better than ANET A8 in terms of part quality and reliability after heavy mod. (Except ANET A8 have much larger build volume and can use 3rd party filament). There are many instability issue with ANET A8 is due to the design and difficult to make it problem free. So, with Da vinci Jr. 1.0, I would say you have many mod and repair to do in the beginning. But with ANET A8, I would say you made mistake buying that printer.

Sorry for bad English. Let me know if anything I described is not clear.

Hello sir! :-D

I will try your recommendations and see if that tells me where the problem is.

Before I look at any mods, do you think I should try and send this back under warranty, or would it be better to ignite the warranty and do some mods to improve it?

I'm a beginner to 3D printing, but I'm reasonably good at soldering (as long as it's not too small) and I'm slowly getting more confident with mechanical parts (I've replaced gears and motors on vinyl cutters, but they're bigger and less sensitive to handling).

Is that the very tiny 3pin connections? Do you mean it would be better to replace the wires?

If I'm going to mod it, would it make sense to replace these connectors with something a bit more robust?

This is what I have done. I had my girlfriend also looking with a magnifying glass to check alignment. I can honestly say it's aligned very precisely. :-)

I have cleaned it as much as I can, so I don't think there is a clog. I can push filament through easily, and it flows smoothly when loading filament. I'm going to do the suggestions above to, in case there's a small particle in the extruder that standard cleaning hasn't removed.

I am extremely grateful for your help! You are obviously very experienced with this printer. Could you point me to which mods you think would make this a great printer? Perhaps I would be able to make a list and then gradually improve it. I'm sure that would be rewarding and a good learning experience.

Please don't apologise, I'm extremely grateful for your help, and your English is fine!

I can't help but wonder if Simplify3D might just work better than XYZware anyway... however... it's expensive... and I don't see a 30 day trial or anything.

XYZ Support have still not responded to the ticket opened Wednesday. The supplier (eBuyer) refuse to issue a returns number until XYZ Support have said I need to return the printer. I have to decide if I want that fight, or whether I just continue to solve this myself, and if I can't, get a different printer from somewhere else (Creality CR10 from Gear Best maybe?)..

I'm not tied to using XYZ filament - I have a little NFC tag programmer and a load of NTAG213 stickers. They work, I've just not had the opportunity to use any yet because the printer broke! I tested the tags just by holding them next to the spool holder and the printer seems tricked into thinking there's a spool of my choosing there.

Progress!

The 6-pin stepper cable was never removed or touched, but I checked it anyway - no issue there. There's also a 4-pin connector of the same type going to a small board that I had unplugged and reinserted - again no issue there.

I checked the pinch rollers - they're perfectly aligned. The filament is sitting absolutely dead centre on both the channel in the drive roller, and the grooved part of the other roller. I can't see any way to adjust spring tension. It's quite high, because it takes a bit of effort to pull it far enough to insert filament, so it's not that easy to get the filament all the way down the bowden to the extruder for loading. This is no different from how it has always been.

The thing that made the biggest difference is changing the filament. I was using the 100m roll of white that came with the printer, and was down to the last 15m. I'm now using a new roll of "XYZ Junior series 600g clear yellow". I've got thump thump thump from the feeder when it first starts putting down the raft or first layers, but the raft looks fine. That stops after about 2 layers, and it seems to act normal with the setting tweaks below. It is now printing "ok" but I'm sure it was better originally, so there must still be things to resolve. I don't think the thumping is the offset, because it does it even with the nozzle 2mm above the bed. Could there be something in the main body of the extruder that isn't right?

So far the best results I've got are by slowing down everything. Print speed to "low", reducing the retraction speed to 20mm/s, reducing the retraction distance to 3mm, and bumping up the temperature by 5C (it monitors at 206C).

It seems to have a lot of trouble getting that first layer down, and I'm going back to trying different Z-Offset settings to see if that can be resolved. At the moment my nozzle is 0.25mm from the bed at the edges, and about 0.20mm in the middle - I don't know why the bed is raised in the middle - I'm thinking of flipping the glass over and see what happens.

I printed off the official "wind duct" that attaches to the extruder - it printed ok, even though I had the thump-thump at the start. I can't say that's making any difference at the moment, but I've left it attached for now.

I printed the samples - the little heart pendant and the twisted vase - both seem ok, and look the same as the ones we printed when we first got the printer. Neither are brilliant, but they're reasonable. Again, first two or three layers "thump-thump-thump" then normal. Again I needed to adjust the speeds and temp.

If I printed the E3D hot end mod, does that mean I could have a 0.3mm hot end, or would I need to buy the "XYZ 0.3mm extruder with nozzle" first? If I'm going to have to replace it, I'd rather have the higher resolution.

1. Simplify3D is very expensive, I would recommend Cura+Threedub. There are post in this forum with instruction, it do improve print quality a lot if you have layer cooling fan and slice with Cura and then convert gcode to .3w with Threedub.

2. XYZ Support is not very helpful, I would not waste my time deal with them unless out of options.

3. If you don't have weak extruder motor, then you have high resistance in the PFTE tube or throat or nozzle. People usually clean throat and nozzle well but ignor the PFTE tube, check both end too see if the opening is wide and round with no melted plastic stick there. You can cut 50mm of the PFTE tube out on both end and round the inside to make sure no additional resistance for filament to go through.

4. The reason you got  thump thump thump from the feeder when it first starts putting down the raft or first layers but not the rest layer because XYZware use 0.3mm for first layer and the rest layer will change with your setting of layer height. So if you have high resistance in PFTE tube or throat, your fist layer will not able to flow plastic fast enough. If you layer height is set to 0.2mm or smaller, then the situation will get better. if you print with 0.3mm layer height, then you are expect to hear the  thump thump thump from the feeder all the time.

5. the wind duct or layer cooling fan will help with print quality, but will not help with your extruder issue.

6. If I printed the E3D hot end mod, does that mean I could have a 0.3mm hot end, and you don't need to buy the "XYZ 0.3mm extruder with nozzle". E3D hot end mod work with E3D or E3D clone hotend, they are cheaper and better, you don't really get jam with E3D or E3D clone.

7. High resolution come with cost of much slower printing speed, and it will take much longer to print. I would only recommend 0.3 mm mod if you have another larger build volume 3D printer with 0.4 mm nozzle, then you can use Jr. with 0.3 mm nozzle only for high resolution stuff.

8. When your printer is cool, you should read room temperature, ice water mix should bring it down to 0C, if you want to test if 200C is acculate, you need thermostats, there are thermostats for oven or candy can go that high, you may find one in your (parents) kitchen.

9. the temperature +5C adjustment affect all layer, but layer height only affect 2nd layer and above.

I thought the same thing before I really tried .3 mm nozzle, but after I tried it, the improvement in resolution is very significant. It do take a lot longer to print, and you need to print a lot slower than 0.4 mm nozzle. Layer resolution mostly reflect in how smooth your z-band is and with good Calibration and proper settings I can basically make the z-band not visible by naked eye at 0.2 mm layer height (it still shows up after zoomed with camera and reflected in light).

But the resolution is still limited with 0.4 mm nozzle especially in application that a box with text on the surface. How clear the text is and how small font you can go will be largely depend on how small the nozzle size is. It also help when print object with fancy pattern with curves on surface. It doesn't seemed much change from 0.4 mm to 0.3 mm but difference in results are stunning. 0.2 mm nozzle give you even better result but it also clog/wear off quicker.

But I do agree calibration and proper settings are the key to the max resolution your printer can do. 0.3 mm nozzle will do you no good if printer is not well calibrated or even vibrating. If you are still struggle with z-band consistency, or many other issues, switch to 0.3 mm should not be your first priority.

One thing I do like with the XYZ extruder is that if I had two sizes, it takes about 20 seconds to swap them over. That's quite appealing, as long as the connector itself is reasonably robust.

If it was stuck plastic then it would not matter what speed you run it, the problem would still be there. However he said when he slows down it goes a way. That being said his problem is what he suspects and not the same as the one you had.

The firmware update he got is ignoring the temp set in the carts and instead is using a default global temperature. I no longer have an XYZ machine but from what I have heard the newer host for those machines allows you to modify the temps. I also would bet that some where in the settings there is an allowance for it to simply use the carts temp but in his case that is not enabled. So the machine is using a default temp that is too low for the speed is running.

I have used many printers and I rarely see one whose reported hotend temp is correct. I have seen a variance of up to 20 degrees. In those case you simply have to use trial and error and keep increasing the temp by 5 until it can print all of a layer with no thumps.