I have an issue with the right extruder whereby it appears to be clogged. The extrusion motor and gears are attempting to rotate but jumping back. Is this ‘clicking’ of the gears a symptom of the clogging that so many others have reported?
I am trying to print using PLA Breakaway (at the moment but this has happened with other materials). To test it I used manual mode at 210c and the problem appears. Increasing the temperature, say up to around 225c, will cause it to release and start extruding. I applied this temp setting to a job and although it started to print, eventually it failed with the same symptom.
The machine cooled down, I went back to manual and again it starts extruding properly at around 225c. And repeated the job test again, and it failed again.
I know I’ve had successful PLA prints in the past at 210c. I’ve tested this with a standard nozzle and a hardened nozzle. Both failing at the same temperatures. The only thing I can think of that preceded this issue was using carbon fibre nylon in the hardened steel nozzle a couple of times. Although those prints worked OK.
I often have a problem where I use PetG in a print head, and if I try to use PLA afterwards, it gets clogged or partially cogged as a little bit of PetG tries to feed through at a lower temperature.
This sounds like your problem.
Only solutions I have found is to really flush the heat tube and nozzle.
Do a cold pull, or change the nozzle…
HI TK4132. Thanks for your response. I think I did something similar. I extruded at max temp for a couple of minutes. Occasionally on the white Breakaway PLA I would see a small fleck of a different colour and the extruded material would sort of kink. I will try this again.
A cold pull is when you insert your filament and heat to temp. Then Cool the head to below melting temp and manually pull the filament out. Hopefully the more solid filament pulls any old leftovers out of the heat tube and nozzle from the back end, rather than trying to force it out the nozzle.
Eg. Pla heated to 210 then cooled and pulled at about 160.
I didn’t have this problem until I did. Randomly skipping during prints and more than once. Flushing is one option. But it was persistent and very problematic.
I’ve had much more reliable prints since getting all metal hotends. Snapmaker now makes them officially, and those are what I’m currently using.
Then I had a new issue with it only jamming randomly when I started prints. Found an apparent solution to this described here.