Rambo and/or EZstruder stepper overheating?

[Captain Starfish]

I can see a Kraken on my unit one day loaded with 0.25 for perimeters, 0.7 for fill, 0.5 for soluble support and 0.5 for "well I have four spots, add arbitrary different colour or something here"

[Eaglezsoar]

I can see a Kraken on my unit one day loaded with 0.25 for perimeters, 0.7 for fill, 0.5 for soluble support and 0.5 for "well I have four spots, add arbitrary different colour or something here"

Did you order the Kraken?

[Captain Starfish]

Gods no.

This is my first printer, and I want to keep the learning as incremental as possible.

I'm still on the SMC peek style hot end with a 2nd extruder kit sitting in the box.

I want consistently good printing off a single head with a solid gut feel for the different materials and the parameters they need before I go to the dual extruder and the learning curve that will follow with that upgrade.

THEN I will probably upgrade to E3D hot ends to cope with nylon a bit better, and start the learning curve all over again.

THEN, if the dual extruder isn't getting it done, I might start looking at the Kraken - about that time it'll be up to v12 and working well

[Eaglezsoar]

Gods no.

This is my first printer, and I want to keep the learning as incremental as possible.

I'm still on the SMC peek style hot end with a 2nd extruder kit sitting in the box.

I want consistently good printing off a single head with a solid gut feel for the different materials and the parameters they need before I go to the dual extruder and the learning curve that will follow with that upgrade.

THEN I will probably upgrade to E3D hot ends to cope with nylon a bit better, and start the learning curve all over again.

THEN, if the dual extruder isn't getting it done, I might start looking at the Kraken - about that time it'll be up to v12 and working well

Understood and sounds like a good plan.

[MattBill1]

So I just built my Rostock Max V2 and printed the PEEK fan shroud and the layer fan shroud out of ABS with little to no issues. When I put the PLA in to try and print with that it kept getting all jammed up inside of the ezstruder housing. When I go to touch the stepper driving the ezstruder it is HOT ( not warm HOT ). I think the heat from the motor is adding to or flat out causing the issue.

My ezstruder stepper current is at the default in the code of 200

Is the consensus here that I need more cooling for the Rambo board? doesn't seem to make sense to me but I am about 24 hours into owning a 3d printer. That being said I already removed all the acrylic panels from the bottom because the power supply seemed to be overheating and shutting the whole thing down. I am running it in my garage which can be 85-90 degrees so I am sure that's not helping but I am surprised at the lack of cooling on this thing none the less.

[Captain Starfish]

Nope, different issue.

My extruder stepper gets too warm to be able to hold comfortably, that seems to be ok and not a drama. The problem I was having was that the driver chip on the RAMBo for that stepper was overheating and they have a thermal shutdown inside them. So it would warm up, shut off, remove power from the stepper which would then relax and release the pressure on the filament, the chip would cool down and start up again, rinse and repeat. End effect was every few seconds there'd be this awful "clunk" noise and a hole in the extruded plastic.

Personally, I don't rate PLA at all as a printing material - I've never had good quality results with it, it jams all the time, you can't clean it up chemically, it's brittle as hell and just overall I found it a PITA. Fine if you bought a cheap and nasty printer with no heated build plate that can ONLY print PLA but, if you have an ABS capable machine: why bother with PLA at all? Judging from some of posts on here, when I get a head capable of higher temperatures, I'll probably jump to Nylon and be saying the same things about ABS too

[Polygonhell]

PLA vs ABS is swings and roundabouts, it's a lot easier to get very high quality prints out of PLA, it's much better behaved at very low layer heights for example.
Also the lack of any significant warping makes it a real win for larger parts, and for most real world tests PLA is stronger.
I like the feel of ABS better, it doesn't jam and when I can make it work I use it for mechanical parts, but for example I completely failed to produce a set of usable Kossel Mini parts in ABS, I just couldn't produce the vertices without them warping.