more is not always better.

Gather around and prepare for a chuckle.

The I3 2020 I bought from Hearless has been a good machine,   A bit temperamental at times but it really does good work.    Most of the time.    When it wants to.    Silly machine. 

Seriously though we bought it to jumpstart our business after a setback,  and now it does duty as a prototype/test machine.    Along the way it developed a habit of skipping and stalling during extrude.

Initially I thought it was a thermal stability issue at high temps so I replace the thermistor with a TC.          Started printing well again,   then after some mods it started misbehaving again.

So I turned up the V-ref on the E-drive.     Slight improvement.   Gave it more power.

The board it shipped with eventually died (as all good things do),  so I replaced it,  and flashed the firmware back to it...  and the skipping came back.

A helpful member suggested some tuning,   more E-steps,  more acceleration,  more power.

It got worse and worse,   so I replaced the motor.    And the driver.    And the board again...   and this problem would NOT GO AWAY.

I reached out to Heartless,  she was stumped.    Calls to Folgertech basically resulted in "If you ordered an FT-5 press one,  all other callers can hang up and--"   Well not quite but they had very little to say.

Reached out to Heartless again.    She suggested turning down a certain setting in the firmware...

And what in the name of all that isn't bacon it worked.

So I lowered another setting.

And another.

To the point where I had massive underextrusion and from there I've gradually dialed it back in.

Go ahead and laugh...   I was following the advice of those who came before me.   And it seemed intuitive -- stalling = more power/more steps.     Turns out we were overfeeding to the point the machine was going "LISTEN, HUMAN I CAN'T CHEW ALL THIS STOP OMG."

Long story short... well sometimes even us "experts" have our moments.   Hopefully by sharing this I can prevent someone else from going down the same path.