Been working on a series of prints and latest pieces are starting and then the filament stops flowing. I’m printing with Polylite PLA and had sucess on the prints just a few days ago. I then started to have prints fail/ filament discontinue to flow as the head continued to move through the Path. Started to suspect heat creep, but this happens at various time sometime early sometimes later in the print. As a test I printed out the Benchy and it made it through just fine. Any Ideas for troubleshooting this would be appreciated. Thanks.
I am far from an expert, but it does sound like a flow problem of some type. I would first try decreasing the temperature by 5 degrees. If it fails again, you can turn off retractions. This will make things stringy. If it completes I would then decrease my retraction settings.
I had similar issue with my Taz 6. I just decreased my temperature gradually by 5 degrees until it completed successfully.
I just noticed you said these same prints completed successfully a few days ago. It could be your filament has picked up moisture. Decreasing the temperature should help.
Inspect the hobb gear (filament feed gear) to make sure the teeth are clogged with filament (a few puffs of a compressed air will clean them).
One possibility is… If your print job has a lot of retractions in a short amount of filament it can grind the filament to the point that it quits moving. (There are slicer settings to limit the max number of retractions in a given distance of filament.) I’ve had this happen to me a few times.
Thanks for all the tips. After continued fails, I started to inspect a bit more in the gearing/ feeding elements. I removed the extruder from the printer and found a small crack in the small herringbone gear, which was had stopped spinning the large gear to feed the filament. Luckily I have a friend who has a workhorse and was able to get a replacement printed. After some downtime getting the new gear installed, the printer is back Taz 6 is working like a charm. I would highly suggest printing a few of these working parts just for an occasion like this.
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