Hello, I am fairly new to 3d Printing and I own an UP Mini. I have been printing mostly with hatchbox PLA (which cost me $30) I was running low so I bought a new spool of excelvan1 (I paid $16). Every print I have tried to run won’t finish because the excelvan filament won’t feed through completely. The extruder starts to try to pull on it, making a loud noise and the filament coming out gets smaller and smaller until the print fails and nothing comes out. Its not clogged though because I can extrude and withdraw the filament. I even put the small amount of matchbox filament I had left back in and it printed like normal.
Is the cheaper filament the problem or do i need to adjust heat?
Also I do not know how to change the temperature on the UP Mini, it only has preset temperatures for ABS and PLA.
How big are the parts you’re trying to make? If there are large parts is directly related to low temperature.
But if not, I wouldn’t dismiss that option either. Try to find the way to increase a little (5º C) the nozzle temperature and give us a feedback.
Also, once I bought an awful red PLA that behaved like that, a cheap one bought on eBay. Do you have more material to try the same gcode with another filament?
1) Make sure your filament diameter is what you have keyed in your slicing software. For instance, if you have keyed in 1.75mm on Cura, verify if your filament dia is actually 1.75mm. Some cheap quality filaments will be slightly thinner or thicker. In this case, you might have to adjust the actual diameter in your software.
2) Is the filament brittle? Try holding the filament with two hands with say 50-70mm distance between two fingers and try flexing the filament. If it is too brittle, the filament will snap immediately. A good filament should have a certain amount of flexibility to it.
3) Try this method. Lift your extruder to 50-60mm from bed, heat the hotend between 190-230 degrees increment by 5 to 10 degrees each time, and try extruding the filament. See which temperature best suits your filament type.
I agree with the partial clog. It happened to me also. The extruder was making clicking sounds every so often, and it got to a point when it refused to extrude anything in the middle of one of my prints (print failure!). The cause were debris on my spool, which I remedied by using a filament filter. I never had a problem ever since. Btw, I print at 200 degrees Celsius.
Sometimes cheaper filament will have varying size. The nominal size is 1.75mm or 3mm, but I’ve seen cheap filament with bulges up to twice the nominal size. Higher quality filament makers will run the filament through a QA process to avoid huge size problems. I don’t know for sure if that’s your problem, but that would be my guess from your description. If you have calipers (which I highly recommend), you can check the filament size. If the size varies, you could try cutting out the oversized part, but there’s always the chance you’ll run into another and fail a print later on. Good luck!
clogs are causer by several factors. in my experiencie, pinting in south america(Chile), with expensive and dometimes very cheap filaments (there is not local supliers), and found :
-check the diamater with a good caliper (cheap digital are fine). use this value in the slicer. read around 1m and take the average.
when clog: check if the part of the filament have a protuberance near the hotend: your filament is getting soft in the tube, not in the hot end. that happens when the tube before the hotend is not cooled enough, or the refrigeration is insuficient(here, with 28º celcius i know that using my heated bed is imposible due the fans cant really cool enough nothing, just thermodinamics)
- make a maintenance of the extruder, clean the remains of plastic in the treaded wheel , when have debris of previous plastics, is more probable that cant extrude well and cant push enough the filament
- check the tension of your extruder. if is too lose , slips and when is too tight, can damage the filament and acumulate debris in the extruder.
- Use the right temperature. 200º is enough for most color PLA, i use 210 or 215, but i have an E3D v6 extruder, a beast for printing(highly recomended).
Good luck, and if dont work, just switch for a good high quality filament
For now, without the fan shroud upgrade, this is the optimum temperature for printing in my i3 so far. I use locally manufactured filament, but I haven’t actually asked them about its optimum temperature. I had print quality issues with temperatures above 210’C, so I’m currently sticking with 200’C.
I always print at 193-195ºC for PLA in my Prusa i2, and overtemperature also could clogg you extruder, due a vacuum effect produced by the heat climbing through the filament and making it too viscous, does your extruder’s coldend get warm? I had a pair of cloggs due this issue and a fan on te peek thermal barrier made de deal.
