“The print head does its thing, but no filament comes out.”
That usually means a clog. Also, it’s possible you have not fed enough filament into the toolhead for the mechanism to extrude.
The thing about troubleshooting these challenges with new 3D printer folks is that most of the challenges with prints are the user’s inexperience - speaking from experience. It took me awhile to learn my machine, tricks and troubleshooting my setup to get good prints.
I am currently about 99% successful first pass – experience matters.
Here’s my general printing with ABS recommendations:
- Buy or build an enclosure - ABS likes higher ambient and uniform temperature when printing - just do it.
- Heat the bed/printer up before attempting to print anything. I usually set the bed to 105 C and leave it for about 15 minutes AFTER it reaches the set temp (105 C) before I try to print.
- Heat the tool head as well - I usually set it to about 140C while the bed is heating up. You want everything at or near operating temperature before attempting to zero the head-to-bed or print.
- Make sure the nozzle surface is clean - The printer wipes the nozzle before printing however, before I start a print with any material, I manually clean the nozzle using a ScotchBrite one sided sponge while at my pre-temp (140 C) . You can buy these at the grocery store. I wipe left-right and forward-back. This extra nozzle cleaning effort is well worth the effort.
- Stick with well-known industry filaments. There’s a lot of great stuff out there but avoid the cheap no name filaments “Amazon Basic ABS”… really? I like IC3D ABS and Verbatim works best for PLA though there are other name brands that are pretty good. You should have filament profiles in your version of Cura Lulzbot – USE THOSE filament brands/profiles until you experience up.
- My favorite version of Cura is 3.6.20 and I use the default profiles for most everything with good results. The only setting I routine change for all materials and speeds is: Shell > Z Seam Alignment > Random.
- For small contact area parts you will need a brim (maybe lots with tall parts) with ABS. PLA and PETG are very sticky so not so much.
- A clean print surface is important but don’t obsess. I clean the PEI infrequently with the recommended Alcohol/water solution. It’s more important to get the big you-can-stuff off then a sterile surface. No, really I don’t clean it with alcohol that much and try to not touch the surface with you hands, etc…
- That Lulzbot print remover knifing thing? Forget it – almost worthless, better use as a butter or jam spreader. Go buy a thin stainless steel scraper (joint knife I think) from home depot. Like the kind you might apply spackle with. Flexible and not too stiff about 4 inches wide.
- Changing filamant same toolhead – going from ABS to PLA can create problems and more than usual clogs. Make sure the different material is out if possible when changing material. Learn how to do a cold pull for the different materials. Currently for my TAZ 6, I have a separate tool head for PLA, ABS (the original types that came with the machine). I also have an Aerostruder I use exclusively for flexibles, and a Micro for small parts as well the Dual. I always do a cold pull before changing tool heads and don’t forget to “Update the firmware” with the toolhead change or you’ll get funky weird prints.
Good luck, learn-learn and don’t give up.