My prints suck... So I emailed tech support... (Page 1 of 3)

I'm no expert at troubleshooting these things so I won't bother to try. But I just wanted to throw some stuff out there. You mentioned your bed is level; did you mean it's level in respect to earth, or that the bed surface is perpendicular to the nozzle. I ask only because another fellow was practically pulling his hair out thinking his bed was leveled correctly, but what he did was leveled it to earth instead of making it level in respect to the nozzle.

The peeling/warping issue is something we all have to combat. Try enclosing your printer as much as you can to retain some of that heat in the print area, as the cool ambient temp will cause warping issues, as well as any breeze that may hit your part while being printed.

You may have a bed that isn't exactly straight, which some of the folks here have switched to using a glass pane to create a more flat surface to print on.

Hope this gives you some things to check out. Hopefully someone else will chime in on the more technical stuff.

I used my feeler gauge to check nozzle -> bed height (touch off at each screw) and it measured the same, no adjustment was necessary.
I am doing the enclosure tomorrow, well, the sides, waiting on the party tray to arrive in a few days.
As far as bed flatness, I will grab my Starrett straight edge & check in a few. When traveling my nozzle across the surface, it never caught or went across any noticeable valleys, I will check for sure though.
Will blow the crud out of it, adjust the screw properly and get back to this thread.
What I am thinking though, maybe my extruder is pushing out too much on each pass, causing it to compress each previous layer & band like that?

Replies in red obviously. And my question relating to you working for Solidoodle was in jest, the tech there was rather curt as well.

Thanks, here is a link to my Z-rod video on FB.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=56 … mp;theater

Clean the gear out with a toothbrush, the thin sections of the raft in the second picture are definitely caused by the filament slipping against all that plastic.  Don't tighten the spring too much.  The point of that is that it can keep the tension steady despite changes in filament diameter.  If you have the spring compressed too much, it can't adjust very much and is more likely to grind the filament against the gear, filling the teeth with dust.

Wobbling of the motor and the top of the rod actually isn't a bad thing.  If both ends of the rod are tightly constrained, then any wobble will push against the bed.  As it is, the top of the rod and the motor itself can move a bit so wobble will move those instead.

the stripping of filament that causes material to build up in the teeth is, when the extruder is perhaps a little blocked it becomes harder to extrude, then the gear slips a bit, strips the filament and clogs up a bit.

then it's clogged, so the gear doesn't grip the filament as well and is prone to slip more, stripping filament more, creating more dust and getting more clogged.

long story short, make sure the extruder drive gear stays clean.

You're getting tons of advice here, some of it conflicting, so my advice is to take everything at face value and isolate and fix each problem individually, as you likely have multiple problems:

1) Extruding - make sure you can extrude smoothly with no skipping.  If you can't find a spring adjustment that works after cleaning out any shavings, try bumping up your extrusion temperature.

2) PID Tuning - you mentioned your temperature varying a lot.  If you mean your measured extrusion temperature is dropping when you print, this would *definitely* cause your extruding to fail whenever the temp drops too low.  You likely need to retune your PID values if this is the case:

http://www.soliwiki.com/PID_tuning

3) Wobble - your wobbling looks like it may be pretty bad, but you really need to *measure* it to be sure.  Use a dial gauge or laser rocker to see how nonlinear it is, and you may be able to use wobble-compensation to eliminate it:

http://www.soliwiki.com/Calibration_of_the_Z_wobble

Yes it's ok if the motor moves in the XY plane, but it shouldn't move in the Z direction, or this would definitely cause wobbling. By the way, are the smooth rods adequately greased?

Try raising the temperature a bit (5-10°) and if it still happens it might mean that you have a partial clog.

I am printing at °195 - °200 already, doesn't the instructions say not to go above °200 or you run the risk of damaging the unit?
As far as the gear eating filament, it doesn't do it if I slow the feed rate down by half 300 to 150) I am wondering if it is a partial clog, in which case I will be down for several weeks until I can get some kapton tape, unless anyone has a less invasive method of clearing a clog in the hot end?

It's smooth.

On the topic of bad resolution, I was extruding 104mm instead of 100mm so I changed that in the firmware, thanks again Ian, would it being out that little (1mm every 25mm) cause that bad of resolution?