Ok so I have an Anet E10 and overall, it’s an ok printer. I’ve had to make some upgrades here and there of course but I’ve been recently having an issue and I think a motor may be going bad but I’m not sure. When the extruder motor is trying to push out filament, it will “skip” if it’s pushing too hard. Now the printer at work will eat right through the filament if it gets jammed where as my printer will “slip” and NOT chew through the filament. By slip I mean the motor will slip, not the filament. My question is, how do I tell if the motor is actually failing, can I turn up the power or are there some other things I can try? I thought about trying to swap a motor. My X axis motor doesn’t have to work that hard so I thought about switching them. Also, if I were to replace the motor, what would be a good one to get? I don’t have tons to spend but I also don’t want garbage and I don’t want to over load the controller either. Suggestions?
It sounds like you have a hotend jam.
@funinthefalls I thought the same thing too but I’ve swapped out the entire hot end and it still does it.
You can try turning up the current on the stepper driver. It might be set too low.
Just make sure you do not adjust it while it is powered up 
Cheap extruders can wear down where they don’t work as good as they used to. Not sure what type you have on your machine. Many “enhanced” filaments like metal, or carbon fiber, or even glow in the dark will accelerate that wear. Plus they are hard on nozzeles. In my opinion the Bondtec extruders are the best you can buy right now. They are expensive but damm good. I have blown bowden tubes out of fittings when i got a jam.
Usually these motors are set so that beyond a certain amount of back pressure they will intentionally fail. This stops the motor from tearing up filament and can make prints more likely to succeed. If you want to adjust the power, there should be a potentiometer on the board, depending on what they use. Increasing this shouldn’t cause any issue. The motor driver could also be thermally shutting down occasionally. In which case adding a fan blowing across the drivers is usually sufficient to cool them
I’ll try a dumb question: Is the gear tight to the shaft?
@Kleinfeld_Technical not a dumb question but yes, it’s tight. It acts like the motor doesn’t have enough power and the magnets just “let go” temporarily and the motor quickly pops in the opposite direction due to the back pressure. Also, I found a video online (not mine but same issue) of what my printer is doing (though not as bad). It’s like it’s struggling to push out plastic. I’ve fully disassembled the hot end and it’s not clogged.
Is the gear too tight against the filament causing missed steps at high feed rates?
As far as motors, Kysan 1124090 NEMA17 is about the most common high quality motor to use.
This definitely looks like the driver is underpowering the motor.
@ThantiK that’s what I was thinking. I’ll have to open it up and see if I can tweak it because the motor isn’t hot at all. Like when you touch it, it’s not even warm. It’s not cold like metal feels but it’s definitely not over heating. Do you happen to know what safe operating temps are? I have an infrared gun I can check with.
@Kevin_Danger_Powers Safe operating temperatures of the motor are generally “if you can touch it without burning yourself”.
They can be driven much harder; industrial steppers are regularly too hot to touch. But you don’t want to drive them that high because the filament will soften as it passes by the motor.
@ThantiK well then I apparently have a lot of headroom with this motor because it’s not even warm.
@ThantiK So apparently my board only has 1 of those potentiometers. Any idea what this will adjust? All of the motors?
@Kevin_Danger_Powers If that’s in exactly the same place as the one pictured…it will adjust the Z-motor strength. hahaha…
It looks like in order to adjust the extruder stepper driver you’d have to desolder the resistor for the E axis, and replace it with a potentiometer of your own.
Additionally, there’s a ‘hack’ you could do - swap the Z axis (may need to make a splitter) and E axis motor wires, and recompile firmware, then just use existing pot on-board.
So long as the axis with the set voltage is enough to drive the Z stage, it could theoretically work.
@ThantiK I figured that it would only control the z axis. What a stupid way to make a board… Why even put it on there? Oh well I guess. Do you happen to know any boards that I could replace this one with? I don’t know how to do anything with firmware so it would have to be a plug and play board.
@Kevin_Danger_Powers nothing you replace it with is going to be ‘plug and play’. Every board sold is going to be put in a different machine. Therefore, you’re going to have to dive into firmware one way or another in order to configure your machine correctly with any new board you buy.
You could buy a bigger motor potentially, and replace the stock motor and see if that helps, but I can’t guarantee it will.
The easiest boards to configure are the smoothie-based boards - it’s just an SD card with a configuration file that you can transfer between PC/Printer. I don’t know about this particular printer though, so setting up touch probe, etc might be interesting. It’s possible that someone already has built a configuration for this particular machine but that’s kind of a throw of the dice.