I just got my ender 6 this week. After getting it together and powering it up I leveled the bed and was going to try a test print.
The issue I have is the extruder motor will not engage.
I have made sure that the filament will move though the extruder and it does.
I tried adjusting the gears with no effect.
I tried to run the motor with no filament and the same skipping effect happens.
The main screw/gear does not trun it makes a little back and forth movement but does not rotate.
I checked all the power connections top.and underneath and they are all correct.
The cable for the y axis motor looks to be the same as the extruder cable so I tried that to.make sure it was not a cable issue and the same thing happens, it does not turn.
The gear on the picture I attached is what moves back and forth a little when I try to make it move with the refuel setting, I have tried the retract and forward setting both do the same thing. The same happens when I press the lever down so the second gear is not in contact with the main gear.
Not sure what to try next so I am looking for suggestions.
Thank you
First, some clarification on your test proceedures:
I’ve never seen an Ender 6, so that may be the source of some of my confusion. When you say you tried the Y-Axis cable, I presume you mean you plugged the Y-Axis cable into the stepper motor and tried to move the stepper motor using the Y-Axis controls?
If that’s the case, you have a bad extruder stepper motor.
If it’s a case where you actually swapped the entire cable (both ends), it still leaves open the possibility that the driver on the mother board has a problem.
Not quite, the ya axis motor us the same type of motor that’s on the extruder. There are plugged into the same little control board at the top rear of the machine. The cables for these are exactly the same so I just swapped them. The y axis motor worked fine but the extruder motor still only did the small back and forth motion. I did this to rule out that I may have had a bad cable
I did not think to try and plug the extruder into the y axis port on the mother board to see if it moved it. I will try that next.
Ok so your suggestions got me a little further.
I plugged the cable from the extruder into the y axis port on the controller board, and the extruder motor worked it moved in both directions, so it’s not a motor issue.
I plugged the y axis motor into the extruder port on the controller board to see if that port was bad and it was not the y axis motor moved in both directions.
So now I am a bit lost as to what could be the issue.
So now that you’ve got it all plugged in again as it originally was, is the extruder working?
Can you provide photos of the connectors for the extruder at both ends: controller board connector, unplugged; both ends of the extruder cable, unplugged, the connector on the extruder stepper motor, unplugged.
On the cable in particular, I’m looking for/at the little metal locking tab shown in the photo. This photo was provided by someone else in response to a question a few months ago. Your connector may look different. The point I’m trying to make is that, symptomatically, it sounds like a loose, mis-positioned, oxidized or otherwise unclean, improperly crimped, or cold solder joint at one of these connectors.
These sorts of things exhibit exactly the type of intermittent failure you are describing.
