Hi,
Our school recently bought a Lulzbot Mini for use in our classroom. The students are excited to begin 3d printing. The machine has the most current Cura software installed, which I assume comes with the most current profiles. We are using eSun black filament purchased off the Lulzbot site along with the printer.
We printed the initial rocktopus with the HIPS filament, and it worked great. I unloaded the remaining HIPS, loaded the eSun PLA and made the appropriate software changes for the new filament.
I printed out another test rocktopus with the eSun filament. It came out like spiderwebs, but successfully stuck to the bed and completed the print. It looked like this (low quality print selected):
When we moved onto student printing, every successive print failed. The filament would come out but then bunch up under the extruder. I only let each print go a few seconds before realizing it wasn’t adhering and seemed too far off the bed.
Thinking maybe the z-offset was the problem, I attempted to find ways to minimize that. However, before I could change z-axis settings, the printer simply stopped extruding filament.
The head heats up appropriately, is connected and goes through the motions of printing, but nothing is coming out. I unloaded the filament many times, and I saw a perfect mold of the inside of the head, as asked in the documentation on fixing a clogged head. When I release the head clamps and push the filament through, it comes out beautifully. However, when it is clamped up and I click “extrude” in Cura, I hear a purring sound of a gear and nothing comes out. Successive clicks also yield nothing.
If you could point us in the direction of some documentation with images of things that might need adjusting, I would be very grateful. I have 20+ children breathing down my neck to start printing stuff they’ve made off TinkerCAD and I am VERY new to this.
I have a video of it “printing”, but you can pretty much just visualize it going through the motions and nothing coming out. I emailed support and they emailed me back to check the print temperature, which is 205C according to the eSun documentation and profile.
Thank you very much