6 year old ‘stock’ Taz 6. I get either a few layers of underextrusion, or more often extrusion stops altogether anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes into a print. More often that not, extrusion stops altogether. I just caught one just now that stopped extruding 5 minutes in. I aborted the job and manually clicked the extrude button in Cura and it extruded just fine. Printed the same part yesterday and it underextruded a few layers right around the 20 minute mark and then went right back to extruding just fine for the last 8-10 minutes.
Cura and firmware updated to latest. Several cold pulls in this process. I have tried adjusting the tension of the idler arm…in and out. (Only time I ever saw that bitemark and excessive gnurling was when I had it cranked up super tight). I’ve tried switching from PLA to ABS…and switching out various rolls of each. I have had slightly better results with the ABS, but still similar issues. Just slightly more success. I’ve checked the fans, they’re all running when they’re supposed to. I do seem to have better luck printing a single part. But that may be just lack of data and switching of variables fooling me into thinking that. It seemed I had some luck knocking .5mm off the retraction. But didn’t do that when I switched back from ABS to PLA. I’m running a test on that right now. I’ll know in 5-20 minutes. But I don’t get the gut feel that’s the problem.
Fairly safe leaning towards heat problems with the nozzle? Maybe the nozzle’s just ready to retire to Florida? Maybe a good excuse to upgrade the printhead altogether…something I’ve thought about doing previously? I mean, the software is fully functioning. Lead screws are lead screws. If there was something other than heat/filament feed issues…I’d think I’d be seeing all sorts of other problems…bird nests/whacked out offset layers/random piles of filament. Seems pretty isolated to the extrusion process either heat or the filment feed. Only thing that bugs me is, I can manually extrude within seconds of it not extruding during the print process.
Just looking for any direction to look before I start spending money.
I’m not an expert. This machine has just done everything I ever asked it to do for 6 years. I haven’t had to tweak/fiddle/calibrate/learn/etc.
Are you monitoring the temps? If the heater is getting weak and temp dropping, that’s a sure fire way for jamming.
Thermistor going it could be misreporting temp and causing too hot or cold.
Hobbed gear could be wearing down.
All these items are cheap to replace, but if you don’t have a huge backlog of 2.85mm filament, is a good excuse to go 1.75mm with a dual gear extruder.
I probably should have looked at the gear and dug deeper into the physical drive of the filament (beyond just the tension arm). But meh…I didn’t wanna start taking things apart. At this point…I’ve already used it as the noted excuse to upgrade. I got antsy and didn’t wanna spend another week trying to sort it out while having no printer.
It’s a company expense. I’m just stingy. If every car I ever bought continued to perform for me as error free as this machine has, I’d be thrilled. If it were a car, I’d be at 375,000 miles with a vehicle that still looks and performs as it did brand new, still gets as good gas mileage as it did when I drove it off the lot, it’s still ‘fully loaded’ (compared to a lot of other brands). Just the only thing wrong with it is the equivalent of a car motor…the bit that performs all the physical work.
Unlike a car motor, though, I can replace the toolhead for a fraction of the relative cost of the entire thing.
I wish refrigerators and clothes washers were designed and built like this thing. I’ve probably been through 2 of each in the time I’ve had this Taz. Maybe if they started powder coating those fridges “Harvest Gold” like they used to back in the day, they’d last longer. I blame the stainless steel.
My Taz 6 has the same issue. Stock hot end and the 1.2mm HS one. Both can work fine for a while, then clog up. And I also find a real weakness in the Titan Aero is tension handle, where the filament goes through. Many times when changing material, it will have a “bulb” at the end of the filament and get stuck trying to exit through that area
I bought an M175 because I really love Bondtech and Slice Engineering products. I also have a ton of 1.75mm filament! I havent tried it yet but soon