yeah so this is as far as i would get before it would print that far
really well and then it would start messing up and i think what was happening due to the hot end fan
not putting out much air after about half an hour or so however long it took to print this far
i think what would happen is the whole mass of the hot end the heat sink and everything
would get up to the temperature that i was running like 200 c so the extruder
heat was not added as much because you had the whole thing up there was at 200 c
so the temperature sender would tell the controller that the hot end was hot so it
didn't need to pump in any more heat and then it would cause extrusion problems you would hear the
feed roller skipping even though the whole thing was hot you didn't have the concentrated heat
at the end of the extruder to melt the plastic but now i think i've got a pretty good print here
you can see i've got some problems there in the middle let me pop this loose
yeah i've got a little bit of a stringing issue i'm having some problems right in here
but then it cleared up towards the top i don't print pla that much i mainly print abs
plastic i do tens of kilograms of abs and i've just gone back to printing pla and it's been
long enough that when i was printing pla last time i was using cura version 1.5 which had the
separate material profiles so you would have a dot ini file and what i would do is keep one of those
files in the folder where i have these parts models so i had a separate profile for every
kind of part i was printing where i had all the optimized settings for speed and temperature and
all that stuff several years ago that version of cura quit working so i
upgraded to the version four i'm using 4.3 right now it uses a different profile setup you can
import the old.ini file which i did and i thought that's all you had to do but one of the issues is
they added a lot of new options in the new version of cura between version one and version four and
so when you import an old profile it turns out you get some of your settings moved to the new version
like the temperature and the speed and the basic things but then anything that is new
gets some sort of default setting so i think i've i've got it pretty close i just need to do a few
more tweaks here and get this dialed in but the problem was that cooling fan was going out while
i was trying to dial these things in i didn't realize that my problems were related to that
failing cooling fan and i started making changes to the material profile and now i'm having to try
to back all those changes out and get back to a nice clean print here so part of that is trying to
get the print time down back when i was originally working with these parts if i printed a double
holder which is two of these it would take 14 or 15 hours and i gradually worked that down
to where i could get under eight hours and that makes a big difference because if you can get
under eight hours i can print three of these in a day where if it's 15 hours i can only do one a
day yeah good morning youtube so i've come to the conclusion that the stepper motor that drives the
extruder has gone out on my printer this is a new stepper motor here one of the problems was this
connector the little clamp on there had broken and that leads to it not plugging into the
little circuit board on the back side very well i went to solid state printers website and there
brandon has a really good video on troubleshooting the extruder and the hot end and i'll put a link
to his video up here in the upper right corner and i've tried all the things associated with that
i've tried moving the stepper motor to the second connector and then you change the connector down
on the the main board and that worked for a while and then it started acting up again and now i'm
not getting any extrusion the stepper motors also was making a pretty loud noise at certain speeds
at high speed it was okay but at a slower extrusion speeds there was a really loud buzzing
sound and now there's nothing going on it doesn't do anything again brandon has a really good video
covering that so i'm not going to show you all the steps what you have to do is take off these two
screws to get the filament guide off so these two screws go into the stepper motor on the top
and then there's two more screws on the bottom that are behind this heat sink
so yeah like i say i've changed the fan i've changed the connectors i've got that cable
i pulled the x cable out and reseeded it and that's all working fine but the stepper motor
is not running so let me see if i can get that out i'll show you what it looks like
when i get the motor out of there okay we got everything torn apart up here and one thing i
did was i rotated the fan 90 degrees to put the power cable up here on the
upper right hand corner because brandon had a tip on cable management i guess this was the original
fan from type a machines and you can see it had a rather short power cable
and that one just ran right up and plugged in and this kind of dangled in back there behind
the fan and i think that led to a little bit of dust and dirt getting trapped back there
so the new fans that they have have a much longer cable so what brandon recommends is you wrap
the cable around the back of that circuit board up there but to do that you have to
change the power cable from here over to here so it's really easy to change the fan when you've got
this out and then the one thing you have to do on the stepper motor you've got the drive wheel here
so this is your extruder drive wheel and there's a little tiny set screw on the top you need the flat
spot on the shaft facing up so we've got about three millimeter on the old motor the allen screw
the set screw has to go to the outside and then we'll push it back to that three millimeters now
i think i'm about the same setting there so what i'm gonna do is just snug this down okay i think
we got it pretty close there with presetting it to three millimeters there's a piece of filament
the filament is pretty much on the pinch roller i might want to go in maybe a little bit so i might
take one more look at brandon's video he shows a close-up of what that's supposed to look like
so just make sure it's all dialed in right and then just to show you here here's the cable
routing for the fan so it comes out of the side of the fan over here and then you go under the
circuit board and then you come up and over the top and then loop around and the extruder fan
goes into the back connector the parts cooling fan is in the front connector let me see if i
can shine a light up from below and then see if we can see that up above see if that shows up there
you can see there's the filament path moving the flashlight back and forth and so you want to get
that hole that comes up from below lined up with the half circle that's in the drive wheel there
okay we got everything back together and then here's another test you can do so you can feed the
filament down open up the pinch roller and let's see if i can get it in there they were past the
drive wheel and it just goes right into place there hey look at that the extruder works and
totally silent there we go yeah i think we're working again i think this stepper motor must have
overheated so i think the problem is if this fan here is not cooling this heat sink which cools
the hot end this whole thing heats up and this stepper motor is mounted partly to that heat sink
the stepper motor gets hot and then it gradually stops working yeah i guess i should have probably
changed that fan out quite a while ago like i say it's been making noise for quite a while it would
always make noise when it first started up and then it would quiet down so i just never bothered
changing it because it seemed to be working anyway that's how you can rebuild the hot end extruder on
one of these so i pretty much did everything i replaced the fan on the extruder heatsink
i've replaced this one before the parts cooling fan replaced the stepper motor and yeah if you
have any other questions post up in the comment section below and as always thanks for watching