Extreme under extrusion

Filament 3D Printer Technical Help
1

Hello everybody,
I have had my Ender 3 v2 for 10 months now, and have just ran into a problem: it won’t extrude properly anymore. Looks something like under extrusion but at a very very extreme degree, only small little dots of plastic come out and barely link to form the model.
I changed the extruder nozzle, but that worked for about 5 seconds and then same problem; I bumped up the extruder’s temperature to 220 degrees instead of my usual 200 (PLA print), and it worked once again for about 5 seconds before going back to the problem.
Here’s a picture of the effect

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Some of the little hexagons that printed well are when I increased the temperature to 220, and then it progressively went back to doing the other hexagons under extruded.
The problem first appeared at the end of this print, where instead of doing nice top layers it bungled it all up:
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10000060171920×3412 342 KB

Any suggestion as to what the problem might be?
Thanks very much for any help, it’s a pain not to be able to print stuff anymore!

2

News: I actually can’t extrude anything at all out of the nozzle, now! A small dot of PLA does leek through the 200 °c nozzle, but nothing more. And I tested by pushing myself on the filament in case the extruder was the problem, but no difference.
Any help will really be greatly appreciated.

3

Have you tried to manually extrude filament from the control screen, “Prepare/move/ extruder”.

4

Yep I did that, same result as when pushing the filament by hand: nothing comes out

5

Sounds like a plugged nozzle. Pull it off and check.

6

Looks ok to me, it’s a brand new one and I can see the light at the end

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7

A small pin of light :sweat_smile:

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Thanks for the suggestion. What else do you think I could do?

8

You have some build up on the end of the nozzle which might mean it is backing up a bit. That can be from heat creep and/or the tubing moving up and down from wear. I did the “Luke Hatfield trick” (see video) on my Ender 3V2 over two years ago and I have not had any hot end trouble since. It might fix your problem, it is a simple fix and will prevent trouble in the future.

9

Looks like a real good tip, I’ll probably put that into practice once I’m through. But for the moment, I can’t even unclip the bowden tube, something is jammed in there…

10

I’m going to take the whole hot end assembly appartband get at that bowden, I think. Then probably replace with a Capricorn, seems to be much better quality than the standard creality bowden.

1 Like
11

Sometimes the boden tube swells up if it gets to hot (always) for to long,

12

Are you sure your hotend cooling fan is working ?. If not it can melt in the heatbreak causing issues like you are having.

13

Well it seems to blow quite well, no visible problem. Is there a way to be sure?

14

There really isn’t any way to do it without special equipment but if it seems to be blowing then it is probably OK.

15

Yes, if its moving any air, its typically ok. Make sure your not suffering from leakage at the nozzle to heatbreak, tighten the nozzle when the hotend is hot.

16

:+1: Ok, thanks.