today I set up my new Snapmaker A350T, it all went very smoothly. I thought I’d start as the manual suggests with the 3D print toolhead. So I use the included filament, the default 3D model “vase”. But no luck so far. It seems to have printed the base layer, but then the head just kept printing without actually extruding filament, I noticed after an hour that the head was just slowly moving upwards, progress indicator kept advancing, but I just saw an empty space between the bed and the nozzle. I used all the default parameters.
What could have gone wrong?
One thing I found curious is that during bed heat-up the head when to the origin of the bed (front left), and let some filament out, so there is a little ball of filament attached to the front left corner of the bed, just some cm. I don’t know if this anything to worry about. Since it did seem to print the first layer, I wonder what happened? Perhaps the extruder movement didn’t work properly. I also noticed the filament spool didn’t really seemed to rotate.
What can I do now? Do I have to remove and trash the first layer, or can I keep it and try again? I guess it’s like 0.1mm high.
Now I tried to load / unload again, but nothing was happening, then I opened the head’s latch, and it seems the filament broke, at least there is only the first piece inside (sorry photo is blurry). I freshly unpacked the filament that came with the machine, it was vacuum packaged, so I shouldn’t have trouble with it being damp or anything?
Another noteworthy environmental parameter is that my studio is only 13°C, as the upper part has no heating, and only little heat comes up from the ground floor. Is this ambient temperature a problem?
Shouldn’t the machine notice by itself when the filament breaks?
I tried again. I also couldn’t see the filament spool doing any actual movement. How many degrees per minute should I see the thing rotating? I have the feeling the same thing happened again. Is it possible to pause and then open the latch to check, or is that unsafe?
Well, I tried that pause - open latch - filament seems all the way in - resume. When I resumed, the machine was spitting out a bit of filament, so it’s definitely extruding, then returned from home position to last position, and now it seems to actually extrude, yeah. I can also now observe that the spool is slowly rotating. I don’t know what went wrong in the first iteration? I just hope the print will come out ok, despite having perhaps missed half of one layer.
The head moving to the front left origin of the bed is normal; that is where it waits for the bed and nozzle to reach printing temperature. The little bit of filament extruded there is also normal; that is the head “priming” the nozzle before printing.
The broken filament inside the head would be the reason it did not keep printing the vase.
Brand new filament straight out of the package may still need to be dehydrated before use, especially from the lesser brands, including the Snapmaker brand. I suggest using more commonly known brands like eSun and Overture.
The filament runout switch is above where the extrusion gear is at, so any break or issue that happens below that point is not noticed by the machine.
The speed the filament spool will rotate depends on too many factors to tell you how fast it should be going, but you should be able to see it happen every few seconds if the filament is pulling tight. Yes, you can pause the print and check through the print head door, then resume the print, it is perfectly safe to do so.
