I have a new TAZ 5 and i’ve printed a few of the novelties that come included on the SD card. They come out fine, but when it’s a print of my own design it gives up mid process. Today i had the machine running for 18 hours on a set of 6 tiles and when i popped my head in a minute ago it the X-axis was all the way forward and the print head moved to the back but the print was unfinished. For this one i got the G code through Cura.
Before that i wanted to print a little proof of concept for another project before i went crazy and printed a bunch of the real thing. I tried and retried 3 times and it always stopped at around the same point. I used Slice3r to obtain the G code for this one.
I’ve watched my temps, i check regularly on them, and they always fail. I’m only getting about 1cm at best on these prints when they give up. What am i doing wrong?
Are you printing your new gcode directly off the sd card, or are you using your computer to drive it?
If you are driving it off the computer, what are the basic computer specs (ram processor, free hard drive space, windows version, etc.) you are running, and do you have the power profile set to “high performance” for a windows PC? also do you have screen saver disabled or set to a really long time out?
Also, is the position you found the machine at your default “end of print” resting position? If so, it may very well have finished the entire print, but the fillament ground itself out and stopped printing. Try pulling the fillament out and look for a “c” shaped gouge in it, or any fillament shavings in the idler arm chamber.
I had this problem once and it was because I just loaded the gcode before slic3r had completed the export. If you are exporting really big files, it takes some time to write the gcode file, and that also varies from one version of slic3r to an other.
It’s a quick check, just make sure the green progress bar at the bottom right corner in sclic3r has reached the end before loading your gcode for printing.
I discovered the problem to the last print failure at least. The first one bugs me because it simply stops, I’ll try that one again and let slic3r sit for a while before copying the G code.
What happened to the most recent one, i looked to see if there was a filament jam in the extruder and in fact there was a lot of ABS dust in there, and as i retracted the filament a bit i noticed that it had been chewed up by the gear, it was almost severed in 2. On further inspection the jam was caused by a great deal of the filament coming loose from the spool and twisting into knots which eventually got jammed in the feed tube. I’ve had problems with spools coming loose like this a lot with my other printer. It seems pretty common but i don’t see a lot of people making a big deal about it. What does everyone do to prevent their filament from coming unspooled by it’s own spring action?