LulzBot TAZ 5 Filament Extruding Very Slowly

General LulzBot TAZ
1

Hello all,

I recently started working at my school’s 3D printing lab with a LulzBot TAZ 5. Not sure how well maintained it has been in the past since I’m new here. We’ve been having a pretty consistent problem with the TAZ where filament extrudes very very slowly, and only extrudes at a normal speed when it is being pushed down on. This happened with PLA, and we replaced the hot end after which prints were working consistently. But when we replaced the PLA filament after it ran out we had the problem again. Just this morning we tried switching to ABS (Heated up to 220, extruded PLA until we saw ABS come out), and the ABS is having the same issue.

Does anyone have thoughts on how to fix this problem? I read some of the threads and I think it might be heat creep, but I’m not sure what I should do to target the issue. I attempted to perform a cold pull this morning before putting the ABS filament in, but I either did it wrong or was not strong enough to actually pull the filament out.

Thank you!

Lylia

2

220 is way to low for ABS. Try 240. Also check and verify the barrel fan is working, they can fail.

Also use 110 for the bed for ABS as a starting point

3

You could also check to make sure that there isn’t any plastic bits stuck in the hobbled bolt on the extruder. It can be cleaned manually fairly easily with a small pick.