1 Topic by titanium (edited by titanium 2012-12-09 09:30:17)

  • titanium
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2012-08-13
  • Posts: 22

Topic: First tries at printing

We ordered our printer back on August 13, and it was shipped on Nov 30 and we finally received it on Friday December 7.  My 12 year old son and I didn't have a chance to play with it until Saturday night.

We had some hitches getting the default software to load, but it was probably more a function of an old laptop using Windows XP than anything else.  We did have to download Arduino drivers because Windows wasn't able to find them.  We wanted to use the default software at first before migrating over to Repetier and Slicer down the road.

After playing around with Pronterface a little to verify that the extruder and bed heaters were operational, we verified that the x, y, z and extruder motors worked.  Then we heated the extruder and reversed the tiny 2" filament that was left in there by the factory.  We didn't get all of it, but decided to try and feed in some of the sample blue filament that came.  It was cool seeing the white extruded plastic show the change to the blue plastic.

We decided to print the mini Solidoodle by Tony Cervantes.  We decided to just go for it, and pressed the Print button in Pronterface.  After the printer homed all of the axis, it started extruding and printing.  Unfortunately none of the extruded plastic stuck to the heated bed.  After 30-60 seconds of this, we stopped the print.

At this point we discovered that the filament wasn't feeding properly like it had been, and it was being stripped by the gear wheel.  We tried reversing the filament, but the filament broke a couple of millimeters above the top of the heated extruder.  We then tried feeding in new filament hoping that it would push the filament stub back into the extruder, but it seems to slip in sideways next to the filament stub and nothing is coming out of the nozzle except for ooze.

What caused the extruder to clog up during the short aborted print?  We had no problems whatsoever with manually extruding filament before we started the mini solidoodle print.  What is the best way to get the nozzle clog unclogged?

Should we have cleaned the Kapton bed with acetone before we started printing?  Should we have also used hair spray on the Kapton?  The Solidoodle "How to Print" section didn't mention any of this either.

We thought we could get away with not leveling the bed or doing a z-offset because the Solidoodle "How to Print" section didn't mention any of that.  In fact all the Solidoodle "How to Print" says to do is to make sure that the printhead is not resting on the platform, and implies that the homing routing will take care of everything.

Also we noticed that the bed platform default temp is set to 80 deg C, whereas we keep seeing 100 deg C mentioned on the forums.  The bed seemed to take quite awhile getting from 70 deg C to 80 deg C.  I'm not sure if the bed would get much beyond 85 -90 deg C., but we'll have to see tomorrow how that goes.  Also, somehow the extruder temp had been changed from 200 deg C down to 190 deg C by, I assume, the g-code program?

Thanks for any suggestions and help.

Titanium

2 Reply by ronsii (edited by ronsii 2012-12-09 15:01:50)

  • ronsii
  • Member
  • Offline
  • From: PNW
  • Registered: 2012-10-28
  • Posts: 1,723

Re: First tries at printing

Hi Titanium, Good to hear you got your printer and it works(almost)... cleaning the bed wouldn't hurt especially if it was handled(fingerprints,oils...) you can use acetone or isopropyl alcohol next I would level the bed there is a lot of posts on this forum how to do it or here ---> http://wiki.solidoodle.com/leveling-the-print-bed then you need to make sure you don not have a partial clog in the print head(extruder) again there are lots of posts on how to check this on here... I have to leave my computer for a while, so don't have time to link right now smile

EDIT:
Ok I'm back... make sure you browse through the trouble shooting sections at the main site ---> http://www.solidoodle.com/how-to-2/troubleshooting/. here is a link to a video of what a partial clog may look like ---> http://youtu.be/8dA4W2nZezc the material should be coming out pretty much straight down and even. Oh, the only reason I am mention clogs is that is the main reason the extruder gear normally starts skipping and grinding... the other reason is if the filament you are using is changing size throughout the reel in which case check this out ---> http://youtu.be/JZGdMc2ebPo and this http://wiki.solidoodle.com/extruder-calibration

Hope this helps you get printign soon :-)

3 Reply by DePartedPrinter

  • DePartedPrinter
  • Moderator
  • Offline
  • From: Colorado
  • Registered: 2012-08-14
  • Posts: 1,478

Re: First tries at printing

titanium wrote:

We ordered our printer back on August 13, and it was shipped on Nov 30 and we finally received it on Friday December 7.  My 12 year old son and I didn't have a chance to play with it until Saturday night.

We had some hitches getting the default software to load, but it was probably more a function of an old laptop using Windows XP than anything else.  We did have to download Arduino drivers because Windows wasn't able to find them.  We wanted to use the default software at first before migrating over to Repetier and Slicer down the road.

Make that migration already...

SD2 with E3D, SD Press, Form 1+
Filastruder
NYLON (taulman): http://www.soliforum.com/topic/466/nylon/

4 Reply by McMuFFin

  • McMuFFin
  • McMuFFin
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2012-09-01
  • Posts: 29

Re: First tries at printing

Hey Titanium, yeah, sounds like you guys have a clog. This happened to me after my first print. It would ooze out of the head, but wouldn't put down a good layer and the gear would just grint the plastic. I think it was because I left the nozzle temperature on after a print for too long, and since that plastic wasn't just passing through it was just sitting inside the nozzle head burning up and causing the nozzle to clog.

I learned my lesson though, if I'm doing multiple prints now I always make sure to keep the nozzle temp off and the bed temp on between prints, and I haven't had a problem since.

Also one thing to be aware of when you make the swap (at least I made this mistake, like an idiot) is to make sure you change the settings in the slicer config from the default nozzle diameter of .5 to .35. I didn't and this will also caused my gear to grind through the plastic.

5 Reply by titanium

  • titanium
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2012-08-13
  • Posts: 22

Re: First tries at printing

Thanks for all of the suggestions and help.  Sorry it has taken me so long to reply back.  We've been so busy printing that we sort of lost track of time.

It turns out that we didn't have a clog after all - or at least we didn't have a hotend clog.  After a little searching I found out how to remove the small nut, washers and spring from the right side of the extruder, which allowed me to swing the extruder bearing down and to the right.  This allowed me to manually shove some filament in the normal top hole.  With the extruder bearing out of the way, the filament slides right on by the hobbed bearing, and I was able to use the manual filament to press on the small amount of filament that was above the black section.  Once the old filament was below the black section, I was able to put everything back together and start extruding new filament.  I'm a little surprised that Solidoodle doesn't have a video on these very simple procedures, or even a decent writeup.  I couldn't find anything specifically about this on either of the wiki's?  Maybe I'm not looking in the right places?

We also solved the issue of prints not sticking to the bed.  All we did was clean the bed with acetone and raise the default bed temperature from 80 deg. C to 100 deg. C.  We haven't had a problem since (with one exception) with sticking.  In fact, sometimes we have some troubles with the print sticking too well.  We still haven't leveled the bed because prints are looking so good.

We have probably been printed 10-20 hours, and we've only acetoned the bed twice so far.  The 100 deg C bed seems to be the key to prints sticking well.  Why does Solidoodle have 80 deg C as the bed default in the standard Pronterface/Skeinforge software?

We've printed out a half dozen of the gyroscopic snowflakes, the mini solidoodle, the sleigh and eight reindeer (had to print individual reindeer becaue the eight reindeer together was too big for the Solidoodle), the whistle, the coin-op bottle opener, the snake, etc.  The only thing that has hasn't worked so far has been the Wire Bundle Guide by DepartedPrinter.

The middle size gyroscopic star caused the printer to go beyond the limits and you could hear all kinds of noises from the X and Y motors and belts.  This finally caused me to learn about Replicator G.  Sure enough the stl for the middle gyroscopic star was, for some reason, positioned way out in space.  Repositioned the star, saved the stl, and resliced in Pronterface/Skeinforge, and printed out great.  Caution: The Solidoodle Wiki entry for Replicator G has a small typo in the xml text they want you to insert into reprap.xml.  About 3/4 of the way down, the line "<rate>250000/rate>"  should be "<rate>250000</rate>".

[edit] I had all kinds of links, but Soliforum made me remove them all before I was allowed to post

6 Reply by DePartedPrinter

  • DePartedPrinter
  • Moderator
  • Offline
  • From: Colorado
  • Registered: 2012-08-14
  • Posts: 1,478

Re: First tries at printing

titanium wrote:

We've printed out a half dozen of the gyroscopic snowflakes, the mini solidoodle, the sleigh and eight reindeer (had to print individual reindeer becaue the eight reindeer together was too big for the Solidoodle), the whistle, the coin-op bottle opener, the snake, etc.  The only thing that has hasn't worked so far has been the Wire Bundle Guide by DepartedPrinter.

What went wrong with the wire bundle guide?

My only advice is to make sure your bed is level and print the bundle guide vertically. It should take about 3 or 4 hours to print.

SD2 with E3D, SD Press, Form 1+
Filastruder
NYLON (taulman): http://www.soliforum.com/topic/466/nylon/

7 Reply by nickythegreek

  • nickythegreek
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2012-11-18
  • Posts: 673

Re: First tries at printing

DeParteds stl had to be rotated to print to vertically.  I used the slic3r .3mm solidoodle profile and used the speed slider to bump it up to 120% speed to get it done in a more timely manner.

8 Reply by titanium (edited by titanium 2012-12-15 05:48:59)

  • titanium
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2012-08-13
  • Posts: 22

Re: First tries at printing

I tried to print the Wire Bundle Guide exactly as the downloaded stl was oriented.  Needless to say this didn't work at all.  Then I followed your advice and rotated it vertical in Replicator G, saved the new stl, and started printing.  The print came out almost perfect in only 90 minutes.  Unfortunately we're still using Pronterface/Skeinforge.

This mod seems like a no-brainer for the Solidoodle folks to incorporate.