update on the crashes. i slowed the print speed down by about 60% and finished a 5 hour print this afternoon. the faster speeds were fine pre-update. i will incrementally increase speeds this week.
un-related i was also getting stripped filament in the hobbed bolt. slowing down the speed also remedied the stripped filament. i thought it was stripping due to a new batch of filament but am not sure now.
who knows what is going on when you change so many variables over the course of a week. hardware, software, mechanics, my PC system.
i can’t imagine not running a cooling fan on the electronics would have anything to do with all this, but i should have the fan installed next week.