TAZ 6 Adhesion/levelling problems

General LulzBot TAZ
1

Hi,

We just got two new TAZ 6’s last week. So excited!

One of them is working great. It’s been running basically non-stop since it came in. The other… not so great.

We’ve tried printing in PLA and ABS, sliced with both Cura and Simplify3D. We’re getting weird problems with bed adhesion. We’ve cleaned the bed sheet several times.

At first i thought it was just that the printer needed to be squared. The lower left corner of the plate was significantly lower than the rest of the plate, leading to poor adhesion on the lower left. Adhesion elsewhere was fine. This is what the feet on the bad printer looked like:

http://imgur.com/DMUdzkN

But the good printer: http://imgur.com/J2Aan00

This was leading to the left front corner of the Y axis being elevated by over 2mm.

So, we loosened the brackets on the bad printer that connect the left-side 80/20 to the control box and lined up the feet.

Now adhesion there is better, but elsewhere it’s a problem. This is this morning’s print in PLA:

http://imgur.com/vIPBG7n

It’s the exact same gcode file that printed correctly, with no problems, on the other printer, so I know the file is fine.

I see a little bit of bubbling, etc., on the plate. Maybe that matters?
The auto-leveling seems to be behaving normally, but I’m really not sure what’s going on. Any ideas?

2

Sounds like the frame is out of square, this is an issue for some of the early serial number TAZ 6’s. There is a guide to get it realigned here: https://ohai.lulzbot.com/project/squaring-taz-6-frame/service-bulletins/

I would also suggest looking at the Z-offset, if you do adjust the frame. On my TAZ 6 it seem to be .1mm too deep from the factory and my first layer was squished.

3

I did square it (well, I confirmed it was squared).

This is weird, but the fix ended up being resetting to factory defaults. Weird because we didn’t change anything. :slight_smile: Anyway, apart from resetting the left side (which was definitely required), it’s all good!