Hi everyone - I recently upgraded from a Solidoodle 2 to the Flashforge Creator Pro and I’ve been impressed with the big boost in quality. However, often when I check up on prints, I’m finding they are failing with a big blob of plastic which is coming off the wall of the print and also usually engulfing the extruder.
I’m using the PLA profile in Simplify 3D and have just been using the PLA recommended setting and not tweaking temperatures or any other parameters. The clear PLA is BuMat brand and the blue PLA is SainSmart.
Has anyone seen this before? Any tips for a quick fix? My instinct is to lower the temperatures but curious what you guys think. Thanks for your help!!!
2 Likes
Dhin
2
Okay so what I see from the pictures is that the plastic isn’t sticking between layers and getting caught on the print head, where it builds up and melts as it comes out of the extruder. Share your print setting because Marvin looks great up to where it fails and melts, I don’t think it is your speed or layer thickness, but I think it looks like a heat issue. But I need some more details before I can says for sure.
So some general info that may help, PLA should be printed at 190 to 210 degrees C. Higher than this and it gets stringy and you can have poor adhesion or melting issues, printing too cool means gaps in the layers and uneven or a rough and uneven surface. The heated bed should be no higher than 60 degrees with PLA, I’ve found at normal room temperature heating the bed to between 40 and 50 degrees works best… though on smaller prints I just leave it off. If the bed is too warm it caused the plastic not to fully harden and the heat doesn’t dissipate fast enough between layers which leads to the print warping and melting as it prints. Lastly PLA needs to cool quicker than ABS, so don’t use the plexi-glass enclosure on top the printer or close the door the air flow will help to cool the plastic allowing it to keep from melting into a gooy mess as the layers get hotter from the print head and the layers below not cooling enough. Finally if you can add an active cooling duct to your printer head. It takes some wiring but it is worth it (Active Cooling Fan Duct v2 for Replicator 1 / Duplicator 4 / FlashForge / CTC by thruit00 - Thingiverse).
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Okay, makes sense. I already have the fan that is coming off the left side of the extruder carriage and blowing air down at the nozzle - is this sufficient or is it worth adding the full active cooling duct?
Also, I checked last night and for some reason Simplify is defaulting to an extrusion temp of 230 for PLA. I tried a print with the same clear material at 195 and it was very good with only one very small blob of plastic.
I sat and watched the whole print and this small blob of plastic was created midway through when the printer actually stopped and just hung in one spot. When this happened, I was very surprised. I could still control the LCD front panel but the extruder was going no where and was just oozing in one place. It started back after 10 seconds or so but it did happen one more time during the print.
Now I’m wondering if the combination of the high temperature plus this intermittent stopping was causing the problem? Lowering the temperature is easy but has anyone seen the issue where the print just stops? Any ideas on a fix?
Thank you guys again!!
You don’t have two temps set in the simplify setting for the extruder?
Dhin
6
Okay, are you printing over the USB or from an SD card. USB has a bad tendency of lagging on the information transfer which may cause the print to pause for a few seconds while the printer waits for the USB/Computer to catch up. The solution to this is to use the SD card. Simplify3D has a pretty easy interface to convert the gcode to x3g for the printer. On the process setting go to the scripts tab and may sure the “create .x3g file for makerbot…” is checked and check the tools>Firmware Conifguration>x3g settings. I should be pretty easy. Just save the toolpath to disk and move the x3g file onto your sd card.
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Are the parts releasing from the print bed mid-print? I had that happen and if the part is small, it’ll just get dragged along with the nozzle and form a blob like the Marvin has.
Seems like it was actually due to the printing over cable as now that I am printing with SD I haven’t had another issue!
Of course, since switching to a glass bed, I’m having adhesion issues. But I will post a different thread to cover this one 
