The wire connector on the extruder motor “broke”, specifically one of the wires, the orange one, came out and would no longer stay in. Doing a little research showed that it is always the orange one.The little spring tab that holds the tiny connector on the end of the wire breaks off. There is no rime or reason why it is always the orange wire and it can’t really be a quality control problem since the other wire don’t fail. Another mystery of the universe.
Now for the fun bit. I could buy another motor for $40 since there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to rewire it or buy some connectors and splice a new connector onto the motor. I’m cheap so I went with the latter. So off I go looking for small JST connectors. It turns out that the small ones come in several sizes of wire spacing.
1mm
1.2mm
1.25mm
1.27mm
2mm
and a bunch more larger ones. It is not fun trying to tell what size is needed. I picked 1.25 and I lucked out. Soldering those tiny wires is challenging, the polite way to say it, to say the least.
Anyway it is fixed and I am now printing again.
P.S. JST stands for Japaneses Solderless Terminal if you didn’t know.