Looking for some help fixing a weak hot end (insert joke of choice here
)I have a Rostock Max V2 that is a couple years old so it has the original Bowden hot end setup. I replaced the power supply with the upgraded version after the ATX supply gave up.
I was printing some ABS Monday at 228C with no problems. When I turned the machine on Tuesday morning I could not get the hot end up to temp. It seems to be maxing out around 175-180C. Also, it sounds like the hot end barrel fan is running much faster than normal (the fan never quite seemed right, always started slow and sped up as the hot end heated). I tried to run auto tune but it times out as the hot end will not come up to temp. The eeprom values seem fine, 255 values where they are supposed to be, PID values where they were before, etc... I have 12V at the heater resistors. The one strange value is the the heating resistors read at 9.8ohms. Does this imply that both are starting to go out? I would have expected around 6.8ohms or less.
I had to get a part printed today so I cheated and turned down the barrel fan value to 40 from 255 in the eeprom. This at least allowed me to finish my ABS print. The hot end held at 223C for the print.
How hard is it to upgrade this hot end to a cartridge heater? Would I be better off with the new HE280 hot end-which unfortunately means swapping lots of parts? Or is my problem potentially elsewhere? I appreciate the help.