Having some extruder jamming issues on my @Printrbot simple. It seems to me as though the filament is getting too hot near the gear. I am just to inexperienced to figure out why.
The extruder motor is rather warm to the touch. Maybe too much voltage is causing the motor and in turn the gear to get too hot and melt the PLU?
I’m printing @ 197° so I’m not thinking it is the hot end, but not ruling anything out.
Advice or suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Try to add a 50mm computer fan that blows on the motor. I added one and it makes huge difference on motor temp. I also made a small duct from clear plastic to improve airflow more.
@Niclas_Oberg thanks for the suggestion. I’ve seen a few folks add heat sinks as well. Where would one get power for an extra fan? The bed/hot end fan is not always on so I would not want to tie it to that.
Where did you power yours from?
2 things to try, on the printrboard there is a dial to turn near each stepper motor. This dial controls how much current flows ti each stepper. More current means more heat, less current means less force, so at some point the motor will buck instead of turn. And at other points it will get way too hot.
Second thing you could do is increase the temp on the hot end, this would decrease the force required to push the filament through, some combination of the two will get you to a point where your extruder motor isn’t super hot.
Also try loosening the tension. Mine was originally over tensioned and it bent the filament like that.
@Camerin_hahn I turned the extruder voltage up in the past trying to combat extruder ticking. About 3o minutes into a print the extruder would start making this knocking noise and no more filiment would come out.
I thought maybe I had a clogged hot end but after investigation I did not.
There seems to be a fine balance between too much voltage and too little and I have a feeling I may need to add the fan so that I can turn the voltage up enough to combat the other slipping/knocking extruder issue.
@Joshua_Marinacci I have it tensioned just to the point where the gear is leaving subtle teeth marks in the filament. I thought I had read somewhere that should be the right amount of tension. Do you know if this is correct? Is that too tight or too loose?
I soldered extra wires at the incoming connector. They provide power for LED an a fan.
It looks like, in the pictures, your hot end PEEK insulator is clamped to the stepper motor via a bracket. The stepper motor and extruder bracket is basically being used to heat sink the hot end. You will need a fan blowing across the bracket and drive gear area for cooling.
Run the hot end with the stepper motor off to check if the above is true where the stepper motor still gets warm.
My suggestion would be to reduce the torque of the idler on the filament, it looks like it is too high and the filament is deforming/ binding as a result.
FWIW, I added a 40mm fan powered separately with another power supply. My filament jamming issues went away after that.
I noticed that a combination of too much idler tension and too much retraction will flatten out the filament and not allow it to feed into the nozzle.
@Niclas_Oberg would you mind providing a little more detail. I have the laptop style power supply and am curious how you accomplished this.
Some of my PLA has to be extruded at 230C. It might be that ur extruder motor is working too hard to push the plastic through causing heat. Try extruding at higher temps. I always run between 220 and 230 for PLA and higher for ABS. Never run into a problem.
On my printrbot simple (beta v2) there is an adapter, bullet connector to printrboard. I removed the heatshrink on the bullet connector side and soldered on 2 new wires. Then covered that part up again with new heatshrink. These 2 leads will give me power as long as the printer is connected to my laptop PSU.
I ended up putting a fan on the extruder motor and that fixed my jamming. Nothing else I tried did. That happened after the upgrade from beta to v2 turned it into a direct drive extruder.
@Mark_Heywood Mine is a wooden extruder with little to no thermal coupling motor to hot end, and that motor got hot enough to be a problem just the same.
Thanks everyone. I picked up a 40mm fan / heatsink combo yesterday and now just need to grab some thermal tape. Plan on wiring them.up this evening. I will report back with results.
