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This is pretty simple: My Orion's extruder was skipping/kicking back. The hot end might be a little jammed, not 100% sure, but the problem seemed to come and go. I seemed to get it mostly on the 1 kg filament spools that I got from SeeMeCNC, but not on the very small spools I had left over from a previous printer.

Then I realized that it stopped skipping when I pulled a bunch of filament off of the spool ahead of time. But then when that slack was used up, it started skipping again.

I think there's a fair amount of friction between the heavy spool and the spool support. So, I greased it. Haven't heard a skip since.

So there you go. Something to consider if your cold end is having trouble.

I accomplish something similar by wrapping the spool holder arm with electrical tape after I noticed a wear pattern developing.

Makes sense! Bare MDF is not a great bearing material.

Have a quick search for spool holders, hubs etc. a few of us have replaced the arm with rod and bearings, works real nice.

I use this: http://repables.com/r/204/ on all my machines. Works perfectly.

g.

Ah, lovely! I wonder if it's worth adding this to the Orion manual as a recommended addition, or in a Troubleshooting section.