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SoliForum - 3D Printing Community → Solidoodle Discussion → Major clogs
Just wanted to report that I had major clogging issues, approx 4 times in 1 lb of plastic, using filament purchased directly from SD. They seem to be aware of the issue, and the new plastic I just purchased from them seems to be working better. But I never had even 1 clog with 5 lbs of plastic on my TOM. The good news is, I am now an expert at cleaning clogs on my SD2 
The bad news, there is definitely some crappy plastic in circulation. Hopefully SD will exchange it?
My natural filament from SD has been the best stuff I've used yet. But can't beat that octave price. The only clogs I have had so far have been from leaving the extruder temp on when not in use, but those were easily cleared by just bumping the temp up. What color where you using?
Black. Never left the the extruder on. The clogs were a nasty, super-hard, almost like ceramic, build-up inside the nozzle. I had to dis-assemble and soak in acetone to clear it. Re-clogged a few times before I manged to purge out all the icky stuff farther up in the hot-end.
Did you see the quote in the other thread about the black filament? It might help you. This was from the Solidoodle Google Group.
Hello Solidoodlers!
This is TJ from Solidoodle. After hearing and reading about clogging issues from our black filament, I thoroughly tested a few known "problem" rolls of filament that were sent back and initially had similar results. At first, I too believed it was clogging, which in turn was causing the drive gear to to shred the filament. After some experimentation, I noticed the drive gear was shredding the filament, but I could still easily push the filament through, which ruled out a clog. This lead me to believe that rather than the filament being 'bad,' It just needs different calibrations.
1) The black filament is generally softer than other colors making it more prone to shredding. When this happens the filament no longer pushes through via the drive gear, which may look likeWhen I tightened the idler swing arm on the extruder, the filament stopped shredding, but the motor would periodically skip steps. Which leads to:
2) The melt temperature for good extrusion is almost 10 degrees hotter with black filament than other colors. My hot end is set at195C for our blue/green/red/natural, but for the black I use 205C. To solve this issue, I tested the black with PID off which causes a sinusoidal temperature swing of about 10 degrees. I set extrude amount to 100mm and observed that at the lower end (190C-195C) the extruder motor would skip steps, yet at the higher end (195-200) the motor would skip little or none.Essentially, If you think you have problem filament, give the following a try before tossing it.
-First, tighten the swing arm, but make sure you leave the spring enough room to compress. Otherwise the extruder will not be able to compensate for variations in filament diameter.
-Increase your temperature by 5-10 degrees. Don't push it to high (210C MAX) otherwise the barrel might become hot enough to soften PEEK retainer.
-Lower your print bed and extrude 100mm of filament. If the filament comes out smooth without any skipping or shredding you should be good to go. Try printing a couple small parts as a test.I will not say this will fix issues for everyone, because I simply don't have a sample of everybody's filament. But it has worked with all the problem filament I have tried so far.
If you want to give your problem filament another go, follow these steps and respond with your resultsCheers.
TJ
*First, tighten the swing arm -- The idler/swing arm that I made can really make easy work of printing with black. I could never get it to print good before with the filament, but now that I have revisited it with my idler (which I can tension even more) all I can say is "GG" clogs (it pushes everything right through and I don't get dust since the grip is so tight.) I 100% agree with the needed temps being higher for black. I run it at 200 and everything else is 192.
Excellent thoughts.
"After some experimentation, I noticed the drive gear was shredding the filament, but I could still easily push the filament through, which ruled out a clog."
I could not "easily push the filament through" which rules this out. All the clogged plastic in the hot end was extremely "crisp" and had a weird texture to it. Quite obviously of a different composition to "good" ABS.
I have offered to exchange it with the SD guys. We'll see what they say.
*First, tighten the swing arm -- The idler/swing arm that I made can really make easy work of printing with black. I could never get it to print good before with the filament, but now that I have revisited it with my idler (which I can tension even more) all I can say is "GG" clogs (it pushes everything right through and I don't get dust since the grip is so tight.) I 100% agree with the needed temps being higher for black. I run it at 200 and everything else is 192.
I used to use this approach, tightening the idler spring right down until it was totally compressed, and then backing off a turn or so. I now keep the idler spring set so that almost none of the screw shows (i.e., much looser). This seems to have fixed some problems I was having where the extruder would fail erratically (digging divots in the filament). I was also seeing a lot of filament shavings, and now I am seeing none. My point is that having the idler very tight may not be universally good.
The arm moves back and forth a fair bit with mine. Sam had told me once that this is dealing with variances in filament diameter, but I don't think that's it, since most filament is pretty consistent. I think what the spring does is allow the extruder to deal with twists and bends in the filament. If a spool that started out printing well stopped working toward the end, maybe the idler arm was too tight to let it accommodate the increasingly tighter bend in the filament.
Makerbot printers have always had a rigid plunger rather than a spring, so it's up to the user to figure out the right tension, and if the the right tension changes, the plunger can't change to accomodate it. That's always been a problem with their extruder, and tightening the Solidoodle's idler arm enough to keep the spring fully compressed all of the time removes the benefit of having the spring in the first place.
I too have gotten my extruder totally clogged by the black filament from SD.
I tried cleaning with acetone by leaving the nozzle immersed for half a day many times. I bought a .3mm drill and drilled it through. Tested different tensions on the spring. Used red filament from SD instead, but now the printer is totally unusable. I think I might need a completely new nozzle. After cleaning the nozzle I can print for about 5 minutes before the print becomes horrid, and another minute until it just stops extruding. When I physically push down on the filament with pliers (while extruding) it will go through, barely.
I am so fed up with this and become vexed by only looking at all that potential and beautiful machinery going to waste. Not to mention the money I paid for it. I'm very dissatisfied with this. "Spend 5 hours cleaning for 5 minutes shoddy printing." This wasn't what they advertised.
Have you tried running it a bit hotter after unclogging it?
At some point you should just buy a few new hot ends (either from Solidoodle or form qu-bd or hotends.com). Once the hot ends become unreliable, I'm not sure that they can be reclaimed with certainty.
I'm running a white ABS right now. Don't ask from whom as I have no idea. But I found that the first layer temp should be 195C and subsequent layers 193C. I keep the glass bed at 95C. I'm getting some fantastic prints of small wooden barrels. Very little cleanup is needed to use these as masters in making RTV molds.
I was trying to use PLA but the prints weren't as good. Also, I'm running at .2MM, half way between .1 and .3MM. I'm real happy with this as I feel it gives me a bit of both, fine layers with good feed. I still need to work on the 'cobwebs' as I call them. These are the fine threads between print towers when the part being printed isn't a single column item.
I'll also describe my situation, maybe someone may give me a hint what to do...
My extruder seems clogged and I need assistance in clearing it. I haven't disassembled the hot-end yet.
I work with ABS, "natural" from Solidoodle box and other colors from Jet2004 (Amazon.uk)
I was making some part of famous "heart gears", when in the middle of the print the extruder started skippping its rotations. The filament was not sliding, but it could not be pushed through the hot end (190C). After I increased the extruder motor current and tried to extrude "into air" to clean the possible clog, filament started slipping against extruder gear. I cleaned that and tried to change the filament.
Next. I noticed, that if I push the small piece of filament manually, it jumps back again from the hot end. I tried to push the abs with 1.5mm hex, and I found that this elastic-behaving element is situated as low as 10-15mm from the nozzle. Is there anything elastic inside? I believe that if there is, it makes the flow impedance (clog) and accumulates pressure. This pressure is seen as absolutely non-working retract - when there should be no extrusion the abs still drips from the nozzle. This creates unwanted bridges and long tail after the part is finished.
Next. I found very bad-looking small droplet of reddish plastic between black PEEK part and hot-end thread, at the bottom end of PEEK, facing to user. Is the filament leaking or I melted the PEEK part? The white "bowden" into which the filament is fed looks absolutely undamaged.
Maybe I should clean the inside of the hot-end with Acetone, pouring it from the top ? Will it dissolve the clog?
There is no point in trying to tune the extruder motor. Even the weakest motor can strip filament.
The spring back you're getting is from the compression if the plastic inside the barrel. If it's not coming out the nozzle then the nozzle is clogged.
Try pushing a guitar string through the nozzle up into the barrel to try to clear the blockage. As far as I'm aware there are no red bits in the hot end. But anything appearing here doesn't seem like a good thing, (unless it's locktite red? -but as far as I know this isn't used).
"Is there anything elastic inside? I believe that if there is, it makes the flow impedance (clog) and accumulates pressure."
nah nothing elastic inside, sonds like your hitting off a piece of unmelted filament..
I'd be looking to dissasemble it myself , but i have a spare couple of nozzles exactly for this scenario, i can change straight away and then fix the blocked nozzle...this in itself can take a few days as i generally soak the nozzle in acetone for a day or even two prior to cleaning it.
I also dissasemble the nozzle from the acrylic extruder/stepper motor, then simply reconnect the nozzle assy with the two wires to the wiring loom and and leave it suspending in air.. then i just heat the nozzle up from RH...once it gets to about 100 degrees, i gently pull on the filament to pull it from the barrel... you dont need to pull too hard, but it needs to be done before the plastic melts... you end up pulling out a single complete soft piece of ABS the dia. of the barrel..if your timing is good, it should by in large come out in one piece, leaving only the nozzle to be soaked overnight.
works for me so far!
Just wanted to report that I had major clogging issues, approx 4 times in 1 lb of plastic, using filament purchased directly from SD. They seem to be aware of the issue, and the new plastic I just purchased from them seems to be working better. But I never had even 1 clog with 5 lbs of plastic on my TOM. The good news is, I am now an expert at cleaning clogs on my SD2
The bad news, there is definitely some crappy plastic in circulation. Hopefully SD will exchange it?
Here's the thing:
We use the black filament all day every day. All of the pieces of our printer are made out of this same black filament. We have had absolutely no issues with it in the shop. We have about 20 early model Solidoodle 2s chugging away on the stuff, and there has never been major clogging issues. It is somewhat odd in our minds that this would happen in the field, and not in our shop where it would wreak havoc on our assembly line.
So, while some people have been having trouble, it is very hard for us to say that there are major issues with the black filament. We use it for everything, and it hasn't been gumming up the works one bit. We don't want to deny the issues some people have had, but perhaps the problem extends beyond the filament to calibration / generalized clogging issues.
solidoodlesupport:
what temp do u run your black at? I ran at 195 and it clogged. Turned up the heat to 210 and it cleared, switched to another color at 195 no problems.
Just to add my two cents. I got a clog with black last week that I can't seem to get clear. I was running the bed at 95 degrees and the hotend at 200. I'm using Repieter Host.
My SD3 clogged today after running a mere three inches or so of black. Someplace here were dissassembly instructions, guess I need to go find them. 
Addendum. I placed a shallow container under the extruder and allowed it to soak for an hour or so. Then I made the adjustments suggested by solidoodle, tightened the tensioner, increased the extruder temp to 200, emitted a length of black filament, and proceeded to make some awesome prints!
I am happy again.
does anyoen know the size nut on the extruder bottom connecting the hot end?
My SD3 clogged today after running a mere three inches or so of black. Someplace here were dissassembly instructions, guess I need to go find them.
Addendum. I placed a shallow container under the extruder and allowed it to soak for an hour or so. Then I made the adjustments suggested by solidoodle, tightened the tensioner, increased the extruder temp to 200, emitted a length of black filament, and proceeded to make some awesome prints!
I am happy again.
Glad we could help!
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