Hi,
I’ve recently brought a Geeetech i3 pro B acrylic 3D printer. I’ve just finished building it and soon will be testing it out but just concerned that I’ll have extruder blockages or something. I had a CTC i3 before which I brought second hand and had issues with the extruder clicking as it just kept jamming and I’m concerned I’ll have the same issue with this Geeetech one.
Has anyone got any tricks or tips before I attempt it’s first print?
Make sure you are printing hot enough. Make sure your not printing to close to the bed. Use decent filament with no garbage. Keep the retraction as small as possible
@Phillip_Ramirez So went to test it and using manual controls in reptier host it extrudes the small sample of ABS that came with it without a problem. However when I go to print it doesn’t operate the motor doesn’t even seem to attempt to push any filament out. But works fine when I manually control the extruder from the slicer program. Any ideas whats up? I can only think of the motor driver being set too low of a voltage so the motors working to move the X and Y axis are taking up all the power an not enough left for extruder maybe? Or could be same thing but with the voltage screw on the PSU?
I have a CTC i3 and i found that if you tighten the bolts down too much on the fan that retains the extruder it pinches the cogs inside the extruder on the extruder casing, just slacking off the amount the bolts were tightened down allows everything to move freely
@Michael_Whitney make sure your temp is up to proper level
Also, adding to this, does your slicer profile use abs temps? If it’s using pla it won’t raise the hotend temp enough to actually extrude.
nothing wrong hardware wise, temps are fine, it extrudes perfectly when I use the manual controls in repetier host not a problem no clicking of the motor, no curling of the PLA etc just near perfect extrusion. But then when I go to print it’s like the extruder motor doesn’t receive any instructions on what to do and does nothing not a sound comes from the motor and I can see the gear on the motor shaft and it’s not spinning at all not even slightly.
Only thing i can think of is as mentioned above, that it’s not heating to the point where the firmware will allow extrusion. Does the hot end temp get to temperature?
When running a print job, I mean.
@Mr_Bonce I fixed the issue. Checked the firmware config and the motherboard was set to motherboard_ultimaker and it should be motherboard 7 so I changed it and now it prints. Here’s my first print it’s just a 2 cm cube: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipMLgUywTB2a6BZ5mzryNVw21F6d33r6HM3DIAWFsbSn3ZMIMyP6pn3Cg_kWnx_-Nw?key=WkJkdXRXMmRlbTBMT0c4S2VHUngyUnNtR1RGSnZn
Looks to me like it has z wobble and maybe over extruding? Mate said temps are too high that print was done in PLA at 60c for bed and 190c for nozzle mate said I should try 180 for nozzle and 50-55 for bed? I have little experience and just judging by what I’ve seen online of z wobble.
also it looks like you’re having issues with bed adherence. Personally I’ve always found that you should start on the big things first and only try to cure one issue at once, otherwise the mix of the things you’re doing to try and fix multiple issue start to cause other issues, all of which show as the same symptom… literally madness lies this way.
So, given you are looking at potential z-wobble (but might also be over-extrusion showing at the same point on an square edge), adherence issues and over extrusion, I personally I would start on the over extrusion first.
Although saying that, I would also triple check that it’s actually printing that 2cm cube correctly (are all the sides 2cm) as if actually one of those sides on x/y/z are less than 2cm, THAT will cause the same symptom as over extrusion! (see? madness, sheer madness)
So, start on verifying that x/y/z steps are as close to reality as feasibly possible, THEN check your e steps, then get it to adhere properly, then tweak the printing temp for that filament.
When you get there, you’ll be able to start thinking about whether z-wobble is a factor or not, before then it’s a whole sea of possible stuff.