TAZ 6 extruder motor struggling to turn

General LulzBot TAZ
1

Hello,

I have a TAZ 6 where the extruder motor and gears are struggling to turn. Sometimes just not turning at all, and I have to give it a little turn for it to start moving again.

It simply won’t turn while printing or filament is loaded, I tried different filaments, the pressure screws/knobs are at the right tightness. Nozzle is heated and this still occurs using Move Axis.

I have noticed a lot of green dust from the stock gears. Extruder assembly is fairly clean otherwise. I’m not the original owner, so not sure how old this is.

What’s the fix here? Reprint the two big gears? Replace the extruder motor? Both?

As I write this, one thing I haven’t tried is removing the motor from the assembly and trying Move Axis. I’ll try that in a bit and get back here to update.

Thank you!

2

As for the update. I went in and disassembled the hot end to get to the gears and motor. Motor is working perfectly fine, so gotta print new gears. I guess the machine and gears is just old.

Not sure why I rushed to the forums when I should have tried this first. Heh. I’ll get back on here once I print and test new gears.

3

Sometimes it’s the grub screw that goes out, but also try giving a little resistance to the extruder motor. This can cause the motor to just vibrate instead of actually turning. This is the only motor I’ve had go out on me on a Lulzbot machine, but they are easy and cheap to replace.

4

To update. I printed out new gears, reassembled and its working fine again. Guess they were just old and used.