Taz 6 cannot produce a good print

General LulzBot TAZ
1

Hello!

I have a very old Taz 6 and no matter what I try, I cannot get a successful print. There are two things thats happen, either:

  1. Each layer of the print is slightly rotated from the last one, so instead of a straight up rectangle it would print a spiral, or
  2. The nozzle would not move up between layers, so eventually the nozzle would be melting the print and moving straight through it while printing another layer. We tried to level the z axis of the bed but no results.

Any guidance is appreciated!

2

Have you ever gotten a good print? Are you driving the print from the SD card or over USB? What is your process flow to produce the gcode? You may have a bad gcode rendering. If your shift problem occurs at different times during the print, perhaps board or harness noise (ie loose connections).

3

Have you tried reflashing the firmware? Sometimes “resetting” the system with new firmware (even if overrighting the same firmware helps. This would wipe out old, potentially corrupted firmware.

5

Thank you – I will try this!

6

I have never gotten a good print, but the previous owners (whom I cannot contact) may have gotten one. We used the sample prints (the octopus, a simple cube) provided to produce the gcode, so I’m not sure if the issue is there. We are driving the print from the SD card. Thank you for your help!

7

Can the gantry move from top to bottom and back several times without any assistance? An unleveled (trammed, if you’re being technical) X axis gantry can jam up partway up a print and stop moving.

The “rotating” layers sounds like the nozzle catching and pushing the print around, and laying a layer partly on it, and partway in the air, then repeating over and over, but some pictures and video would help a ton to understand what’s happening.

This can all be caused by having the printer on an uneven surface, causing the frame to be out of square, and the gantry not moving right. It may be on an even surface now, but got knocked out of square earlier in its life, leading to the same issue. Could also be a dying stepper driver (which happens to decades-old stepper drivers). Bad stepper motors are less common - the LDO motors used are very high quality.

Usually if it’s too out of square, the auto-leveling fails completely, but if it’s aligned OK at the bottom, but one side isn’t lifting right, it can stall partway up.

Again, video of what it’s doing would help a lot, as would pictures of the failures.