Taz 5 Hotend problem, please help

I am having another problem with my Taz 5. I have had it for two weeks as of yesterday. I printed out a large herring bone gear and that print went well. Yesterday when I got I home from work, I figured that I would print out the small one and see how that went. Well the printer started acting like the extruder was clogged and nothing would come out. I removed the nozzle and soaked it in acetone overnight. This morning I cleaned the nozzle out and reassembled the extruder, but now I am having a different problem. Every time I try to print or just to extrude filament, the filament just curls up on itself and the printer wont print anything. If there is anyone who can walk me through fixing this or has an idea what would cause it, I would really appreciate your help. I really just want to get back to printing. Thanks in advance. Below is a video of the problem that I am having. http://youtu.be/7dP99MH8Ppc

That sounds like you have burr on the edge of the nozzle orifice. I like to polish my nozzle tips with a clean cloth and polish. You can use a little toothpaste instead, it works quite well. Clean and rinse and dry when done then hold it up to a light and look through. The hole should be smooth and round.

Since the Hexagon nozzle requires a specific torque when tightening the nozzle we recommend cold pulls prior to anything. More information can be found here on cold pulls: https://forum.lulzbot.com/t/hexagon-hot-end-clogged-with-hips/1388/1

I attempted to do several cold pulls before I took the nozzle off. I don’t know if it’s because I’m using hips or if my technique wasn’t right but I couldn’t get it to work. I have had the nozzle soaking in acetone for three days now and have been cleaning it each day. If I can not get it cleaned properly is there somewhere where I can get a new nozzle that is .35. I did an online search and everything I found simply said .3 mm.

Hi

I took my nozzle off cleaned it but it was a royal pain to get back on. Getting the threads to align and not stripped was hard (aka impossible).

After cleaning it and putting in on I have a few problems with PLA but my HIPS is worse and just like yours. If it does not tangle up it looks like this. That’s an Allen key next to the purple HIPS


Any ETA on when the new hotends will be for sale?

Wow, you couldn’t pay to make filament do that on purpose! But that really indicates something odd in the extrusion path. Could the path through the extruder and hot end be constricted or misaligned?

I have seen that happen once on my Taz. It happened when I was manually extruding at a way too fast speed. I was used to my old 1.75mm machine and extruded at 200mm/min and it looked just like that. When I backed it down to 50mm/min it extruded straight as an arrow.

I too get some bad extrusion when using Octoprint to manually extrude filament. I believe the issue to be to rapid of extrusion. On my machine it is much more prominent with HIPS than PLA. Try to slow it down and see what happens.

I gave the nozzle a good polish and tighten but it seems to have no effect. Slowing down the extrusion did not help either.

I took a look at one of my PLA cold pulls under a magnifying glass and it is possible something is in there so I might try a HIPS cold pull and if that does not work take it off again.

I too am now having this issue. My filament is extruding in free air as a spiral. I have pulled the nozzle, torched it to clean it out, polished the outside and what i can of the inside, and it is still happening. Pretty sure there is a bur / something in there but can’t see it. Any suggestions?


This is very odd! I’ve not seen anything like this and now there are a few folks seeing the same phenomenon. You couldn’t design and build a system to extrude such a cool spiral!

The other nozzles I have tried on the hotend extrude just fine btw.

Ok, that’s good info! What is the orifice on this one and the others you’ve used without this issue?

it’s the nozzle that ships with the hexagon hotend. .35mm The others are some generic .2, .3, .4 mm nozzles I had laying around from something that just happened to fit.

Well, I have fixed my original problem of the filament curling up on me. I originally soaked the nozzle in acetone for a week and had no luck with that. I finally took the nozzle off Friday night and took a heat gun to it. Then afterwards I soaked it in acetone again. That seems to have gotten rid of whatever my problem was. I have been printing just fine since Friday night. (after a few tweeks, but will make another post about that soon)

discojon, I had the filament extrude like that on me today when using pronterface to try and calibrate my extruder. I don’t know why it happened but it would only extrude that way in pronterface. Once I switched over to Cura, the problem disappeared completely. If you have already fully cleaned out your nozzle, try to switch the program you are using to extrude the filament and see if this changes anything. Like I said, this only happened to me when manually extruding with pronterface. I could not get it to repeat in Cura. I was using the same temperatures in both of the programs.

Ok i’ll give it a shot. I am in the middle of a 8 hour print now and it is printing just fine so far. I had 2 failed prints earlier with a hard clog, but so far this time it’s going swimmingly. I have been using OctoPrint when the issue was occuring. I’ll try Simplify3D later and report back.

I’ll update my last post. I aborted the previous print i mentioned as there was HIPS leaking between the heater block and nozzle. Probably my fault for not having it tight enough (FYI, there are 2 separate specs I’ve seen in official material 30 in/lbs and 30 ft/lbs.) Removed it and cleaned it again to get that mess sorted out. found a 7/64th drill bit that fit perfectly in the nozzle cavity and gently spun it by hand to clean any detritus from the walls that may get pushed through. Next was an acetone bath and good stirrin’. Then a thorough purge atPLA at 195*C, which on my machine is about as low as It will extrude. The idea here was to keep the PLA as solid as possible so it would “polish” the inside of the nozzle. Whether or not that was actually happening is above my station. Long story short, the nozzle is now extruding round and straight again.

I’m curious as to what filament others are seeing the problem with. My issue seems to begin each time I use the official Lulzbot black HIPS. Extruding at 230, no contact between nozzle and bed.

That’s funny. Because all I’ve used since I’ve had my Taz is the black hips from the Lulzbot website. I don’t know if there’s a problem with this particular one or just a coincidence. I will probably try abs once my hips runs out though.

Post up a photo of the batch number and other labels on the spool so we can compare notes. I’ll post mine tonight.

My batch # is 2014-10-31-1. I was printing when I read your post and could’nt remove the reel. Interestingly enough I had never really paid attention to the label before. It actually has a listed temperature of 220-260 celsius for printing. I was under the assumption that 230 was a minimum temperature for hips. I know that at 240 I get kind of rough top layers sometime, so I had dropped my temp down to 230. I may have to try another print at 220 and see how it turns out.