EZStruder stops feeding on retraction

[thicks]

Greetings all.
I am working with a RoStock Max V.3 that I have had for almost a year. In general, everything has worked fine, but as of 2 weeks ago, a slight problem has developed.

Whenever the filament retracts(when the nozzle moves and doesn't want to ooze), the EZStruder stops feeding filament completely. The Blue Knob on the extruder keeps turning as if it is feeding, but the filament does not move again unless I hand feed it, in which case the printer continues to print correctly until another retraction occurs. I took apart the EZStruder and everything looked ok. There wasn't any ground up plastic or anything in there. All looked fine.

I haven't changed any settings since it printed correctly and it is printing with the same filament as before.

I'm sure someone will need additional information, and I can definitely provide it! Thanks in advance!
Tommy

[geneb]

You might want to check the extruder stepper wiring to make sure one of the connector pins isn't working out of the shell.

g.

[rootboy]

Well, if the knob is still moving it's not the stepper motor...

Take a close look and see if your drive gear is slipping on the EZStruder's shaft.

Let it run for several minutes and pull out the filament. Has it been ground down where it meets the drive gear?

Do you have a bunch of filament grindings that could be keeping the drive gear from getting good bite on your filament? Try cleaning it.

Take the bowden tube out from the hotend side, now run it again. Do you still have the same problem?

Try raising your hotend temp up by five degrees. Did that fix the problem? Don't go too high or your next post will be about how to unclog your nozzle. :/

And what happened to me the other day was that my spool mount had loosened up and one side of the spool had slipped off of its rollers. Yeah, that slowed down my filament... Doh! So is your spool feeding into the EZStruder nicely?

[thicks]

The stepper wiring looked ok.

Now I'm on to the next list of options. Damn, taking the Extruder off is a pain.
Thanks!!
Tommy

[thicks]

I re-examined the filament before removing the extruder and noticed it has teeth marks along its entire length between the extruder and the hot end. The drive gear looks ok, but i'll have to wait to get the whole thing off and apart before I know for sure.

[rootboy]

Teeth marks are normal and to be expected. What would be a problem is if the gear ground partially through the filament far enough to slip.

Do you hear "popping" noises when the extruder is trying to feed the filament but can't? That's a sign of a slipping extruder.

I got rid of my EZStruder ages ago. This is what I use now, and it works very well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RUGpcVg5nM

[thicks]

After a little more tinkering and checking, now the stepper motor simply stops rotating and won't restart when I attempt to manually feed the filament. There is no popping or any indication something is wrong aside from the fact that it simply stops feeding the filament through.

Is there any way to get any information or report from the motors through g-code or something? Now I just want to run a diagnostic on the motor to find out whether it is the motor or the extruder itself. This is a device I bought to use with middle school kids and they are getting on my nerves asking questions about what is wrong and when I'll have it up and running.

Thanks again!

[geneb]

Have you contacted support yet? You're likely to get a solution pretty quickly.

g.

[rootboy]

A very simple test would be to disconnect the extruder stepper motor from where it belongs and connect it to your X axis. With the bowden tube disconnected (you did read this part, right?), jog *just* the X axis. Did it move for you?

And I'm recycling a post that I made earlier today on how to "manually" command the extruder, so apologies if it looks familiar...


In the interest of full disclosure I haven't tried this on my printer (it's busy at the moment).

First disconnect the bowden tube from the hotend.

Then run this from your G code console:

M302

And make note of the temperature that it returns, we will want to reset M302 back to that when we finish (I'm using 170 below as a default).

Then either run each line (without the comments) from the console, or put this in a "extrude_100mm.gcode" file:

M302 P1 ; Allow cold extrusion
G92 E0 ; Set extruder position to 0
G0 E100 ; Extrude 100mm
M302 S170 ; Allow extrusion starting from 170°C (Put your extrusion temperature back to where we found it)