nathan-peterson

I haven't had many problems with the extruder since I got my ultimaker2 about one year ago. Now all of a sudden it keeps grinding my filament and making all sorts of noises. I've never seen it do anything like that before. Video#1: Extruder spinning fast Video#2: Extruder oscillating back and forth (Front View) Video#3: Extruder oscillating back and forth (Extruder View) I've tried tightening the spring on the extruder which did not help at all. I've tried using different filaments. I've tried cleaning out the extruder. I've tried atomic push and atomic pull. I have no idea what is going on. Please help! thanks, -Nathan

That's exactly what I did. Didn't help.

Err.. well I guess it was partially clogged. It didn't seem like it when I was forcing filament through manually, but I eventually took apart the extruder assembly and used a small screwdriver to fish out pla from above. After doing that it stopped skipping completely. I've never had to do that before.

My printer is having this skipping problem again, although now it's really bad where I can't print anything because it's skipping so much. My nozzle doesn't seem to be clogged. I tried opening and cleaning the feeder, but no luck. Not sure what to do. I'm using ultimaker brand filament, so I don't think it's a filament problem either.

Finally got the dang thing unclogged! The needle worked after some fiddling. All of this work on dealing with the clog also messed up the filament so that it was stuck in the feeder tube. After fixing that it seems to be working now.

I got some 30 gauge hypodermic needles from Walgreens! I will try them this evening. Also I tried taking apart the hotend earlier today. I though maybe I'd try the torch method, but the hotend is not removable from the heatblock on the ultimaker 2, so I gave up on that.

I tried electric wire actually. I tried multiple sizes of wire. I even have some extremely small electric wire that is used for wire wrapping which is either not small enough, or just wouldn't go in because it's blocked. I guess I'll try taking it apart. I think I have a blow torch in the garage too.

It is ultimaker brand filament. Right now it is really clogged. I have tried the atomic method many times yesterday and today. It won't budge. The filament seems to be melting fine though. I don't think it's a temperature problem. Not sure where I'm going to find a small enough needle. That hole is really small.

crap. I just tried to use the atomic method again to see if it would help. Somehow that ended up clogging my nozzle big time. I can't get any filament through now. I'm gonna try buying a really small needle to unclog the thing.

My extrusion rate is 0.1 x 0.4 x 50 = 2mm3/s. As far as I can tell, Cura 14.09 doesn't have retraction settings anymore. -Nathan

I have had my printer for about a month I think. My prints have been decent except for the feeder skipping which causes lack of extrusion during parts of the print. This happens fairly regularly. The nozzle seems to be extruding fine although I have tried manually shoving filament into the extruder at 260 degrees to see if there was anything that needed to be cleared out. I also tried taking apart the feeder and cleaning it. None of those things have helped. The problem seems to get worse if I go above 50 mm/s or increase the layer thickness (the problem is also more likely to occur on the first layer since that is thicker). Any ideas of what I should do?

Do you use the angled bit on both sides to clean up the edges? If so, how do you line it up accurately in the CNC machine after flipping it over?

Hmm... Not sure how oil could have gotten on there. I was using a sponge to clean the extruder though, so there was some water that dripped onto the glass and possibly could have run underneath onto the plate.

I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that milling machines are generally used for metal, because they are more heavy duty, and routers are generally used for softer materials like wood or acrylic. I have access to both with my Techshop membership. The router is a lot easier to use and can handle much larger items, but we are not allowed to use metal on it. Thanks for the tip about that angled bit! That will probably save me some bloody fingers.

Cool! Here is the photo: