Cheetah extrudes, but won't print...

This is on a relatively new Mini. Have done a dozen or so successful prints, but a few days back, had them start barely laying down a film of filament on the PEI. Sometimes I find the filament has kinked in the regular extruder, sometimes not. I had settings that were working, and then quit working. Installed the latest v2 Cura LE in the vain hope that it might (finally) include a profile for this material, and lost those settings, but since they had ceased to work, probably not that tragic.

I’ve got print temp at 230. I’ve read stuff on the net that an issue with this filament is it tends to plug the extruder before getting the bottom layer done. I’ve seen that layer start out okay, and then fail. But I see a lot of nothing but a ghost layer.

The machine prints PLA+ fine among all this. Have adjusted the idler tension…the makers of Cheetah say that most under-extrusion problems are that those are too tight. Have done hot wipes on the hot end. Am currently printing a small test subject with t-glase, thinking that the higher temp material should scour any Cheetah blockage out of the feed path.

But pulling out the previous non-feeding filament, preheating to 230, pushing new into place, extruding 10 about five times (which produces a nice strand of material, every time, and then kicking off a print reliably doesn’t print the first layer (and most of the time, not even the skirt). Abort, puddle of material strands out of the extruder.

Any great ideas? I’m making custom camera gear caps, and this is the perfect material…when it prints.

–Richard

If you are using Cura 21, check or adjust the z-offset value in Cura settings (this setting doesn’t exist in Cura2). If it extrudes normally when priming but won’t extrude first layer, that sounds like you may be too close to the bed.

If that isn’t it… I had better success with cheetah in the standard extruder when using this small gizmo:
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1649544

It restricts the filament path to help prevent the filament from buckling just below the bobbed bolt.