Sigh, I’ve been fighting all weekend trying to get the filament to extrude on my Replicator Dual all weekend. That is pretty frustrating! I can manually push on the filament and have it come out so I know it isn’t clogged (or at least not completely clogged) but it does not come out on its own.
Can you give more details?
What material are you running?
How Hot?
Is this a 2X?
are you cleaning the drive roller out?
Have you adjusted the extruder tension?
Sure Joe, details I have lots.
Bought a Replicator Dual at MakeFaire '12 in a moment of weakness, successfully printed half the ‘spiral box’ thing on July 7th, 2012. Then failed to print the next thing I tried (something with sharks I believe) and then put it aside until this weekend a bit more than 2 years later.
ReplicatorG would not talk to it without upgrading the firmware from 5.2 so I upgraded it to 7.5. After a bit of fooling around that seemed to work ok.
The material is the ABS that came with it (one spool black, one spool white). The black continues to be a problem, printed on white (left extruder) and it managed to print the servo wheel (albeit with some discoloration of the plastic (brown coloration in the white plastic).
Watched a ton of material on stuck extruders, took them both apart (removed the stepper/fan/heatsink) to check for gunk inside (there is none).
The ‘default’ printing parameters in the thing I was printing was setting the extruder to 240C the bed to 110C. Reaching those temperatures is working fine. Moving the bed around is working fine, but just not getting any plastic coming out of the extruder.
So started playing with Load/Unload filament on the Utilities menu, If I load filament it doesn’t come out the bottom by itself. I can push with my fingers on the filament from the top which causes it to come out the bottom, but the extruder itself does not seem able to apply that level of injection force.
What did I miss? I reached out to the 3-in-1 folks who have the extruder upgrade to make sure it would work on my extruders, haven’t heard back yet.
Haven’t found anything on adjusting the tension of the delrin, it seems to be just in there with no adjustment possible.
brown color in white filament suggests overheating. As you’ve upgraded firmware, it might be that the new firmware is not playing nice with your hardware. I would call Makerbot or use their forums to try to figure out if the problem may be caused by wrong temperature measurements. Please note that ABS will degrade if overheated making it less likely to flow happily and even blocking partially or totally a nozzle.
That is an interesting thought on the firmware not actually reading the correct temps, I’ve got a Fluke temperature probe that could probably give me a check on that. There is a lot of information about what the ‘right’ temperature for ABS is, and I’m still trying to figure out where nozzle temp is being set. Its not on the machine, that has the nozzles set for 220 but they heat to 240 when doing a print from ReplicatorG.
@Chuck_McManis the geometry of the hotend, where sensor is located in relation to the heater and filament path may call for higher or lower temps than other hotends for the same filament. I usually work at 230C with ABS with J-Head and 250C with Prusanozzle.
240 is not un-heard of for ABS. I run at 260 on a regular basis on an e3d. One thing I would recommend is baking your filament at the lowest temp your oven can go for around an hour. After 2 years imagine your filament is pretty wet.
How hard is it to push the filament through by hand? It shouldn’t take much force at all.
@Joe_Spanier quite difficult to push through, I was wondering if it might be too ‘dry’ as opposed to too wet ( The SF Bay Area isn’t particularly humid ) but that is worth a shot… But the critical thing is that it “shouldn’t be hard at all” adds new information.
No such thing as too dry.