Extruder gears squeak

Hi guys,

Recently my extruder gears have started to squeeze quite loudly. It only does this in specific arcs of the gear. So it will not make any noise and the when the right side of both the large gear and the small one it starts to squeak.

I’ve tried to reproduce it by rotating with my hand or by extruding, it only does so when there are a large number of retractions in a small time frame.

I’ve attached a link to a video as well.

https://youtu.be/qGtflfclAqY

What do you guys think? Do I need to apply some lubricant somewhere? Or is it time to replace the gears?

As it is only happening on retract moves, I would suspect that it is going to be a setting in your profile. What is the retract speed you are using? Have you tried slowing it down?

The thing is I haven’t changed retraction settings since I took it out of the box months ago. The squeaking is something that has recently developed.

It’s 10mm/s

Any more opinions on this?

Lubrication? Changing the gear?

Pull your hobbed bolt assembly out. Are the two bearings turning smoothly? It could be a bearing squealing when it reverses direction.

Have you resolved the squeaking? I have the TAZ Pro and both have developed the squeaking, primarily during the retraction, up not down.

I had a mini that did this at some point. I just pulled apart the extruder and cleaned it out. I added a little lube to the bearings and carefully reassembled. One thing that can cause noise is if too much space develops between the small and large gears, causing the mating surfaces to rub. This is adjusted via the stepper mounting bolts that allow you to situate the smaller pinion gear relative to the large extruder gear. I also now use a dry PTFE lubricant on the plastic gears which does not seem to hurt.

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The cause of my gear squeaking turned out to be too much compression on the spring. Once i took the filament out and realized this, I backed off the compression, making sure there was enough to drive the filament. Fortunately an easy fix.

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