Soooo… Looks like my printrbot has a bad belt. I hope it is pretty simple to replace. Should I stock up while I’m at it? Is this part of regular maintenance or an unusual event?
Weirdly, the actual consequences of this appear to be underextrusion for only certain parts of the model (i.e. when it’s passing though this part of the X axis). It doesn’t actually skip at this point.
Unusual. Good to have some stock though… Nice and cheap
Yes it is cheap and easy to replace. You should just buy a 10m roll from robotdigg or eBay and be done. Gt2 belts are popular and can be used on other devices as well.
Cool, I just ordered a bunch, and I have a bunch of zip ties around here somewhere… I will post some pictures of the problem it was causing since it what I expected and took me a while to figure out.
Would have to say unusual as well. I switched my Simple over nearly a year ago to GT2 and haven’t had any issues. The one thing I have noticed is that if it sits for a prolonged period of time the belt will develop a curve where it’s been sitting on the bearing (it’s a little funky how it’s routed up and under a bearing/pulley/bearing on the X axis, so maybe it makes it worse).
I always keep a few meters on hand, in case of an “oops”.
It doesn’t hurt to buy more, but I’ve never had a belt go bad even with a chunk of pulley missing. So I don’t know what happened there.
Could be manufacturing defect as well.
Taking a close look at the belt, could it have gotten stuck and been ground against by a metal pulley?
First one I’ve seen do that. I’ve had them break after ridiculous over tightening though.
The printer hasn’t gotten stuck on one spot in the X axis during any prints. I have had some trouble with tension on that axis though; my first couple prints had some layer shifting, and I noticed that the X axis belt was much more slack than the Y. I tightened it a bit, which sorted out my printing problems, but the X belt was never as stiff as the Y.
I guess it was probably a defect in the belt, and it was gradually stretching and grinding in that spot. It just now got bad enough to degrade prints.
On closer look, that looks like it might be a splice in manufacturing that is rupturing. There is a diagonal pattern going on there.
