Recently purchased some protopasta pla and can’t seem to get any reliable prints out of it without having the extruder gears start clicking and getting a failed print
Anyone else have this happen and know the fix?
I’m running a e3dv6 hotend
Persfang duct with Single 5050 fan
Bowden setup
Cr10-s
When the extruder starts clicking, what layer are you on?
When it’s clicking, go to the Control Panel and increase the Z height. is the nozzle clearly above the build surface, yet not extruding?
If that’s the case then you have a clogged print head. This can be either in the nozzle itself or end of the bowden tube.
One question just came to mind: what were you printing with BEFORE using the Proto Pasta? I ask because one possible cause of a clog shows up when you print a high temperature material followed by a low(er) temperature material. It becomes possible to have enough heat to melt the low temperature material, getting it to flow, while chunks of the high temperature material are still on the hot-end walls, but not hot enough to melt. If a chunk of that high temperature material flakes off, it cloggs the nozzle, sometimes hours after you’ve been successfully printing with the low temperature material.
There’s a bunch of things that could be wrong. The nozzle is the easiest to check.
First, bump the nozzle temperature up to 250C. Leave it there for 5 minutes to be sure that everything in the hot end has had a chance to melt. Then manually feed several cm of filament through.
Then pull the filament out.
With the hotend hot, take the nozzle off and clean it out.
Take the Bowden tube out of the hot end and inspect it. If the end looks clogged or charred, cut 5mm off and re-insert it, being sure to push it all the way down.
Then try the Proto Pasta again.
For what it’s worth, I tried PC (polycarbonate) 2 weeks ago. The first print went fine. Nothing but problems after that. It prints at the high temperature end of what my printer can do to and I ended up having to snip 5mm off the end of the Bowden tube to get it working again.
It starts clogging and the gears start clicking after it’s successfully printed 40 layers or so
I’ve recently changed the nozzle
I’ll.check the bowden tube next