[Help: one axis starts shifting in middle of print]

Hi, SciRefDesk,

If you're having shifting prints, it's most often caused by a loose set screw, either in the pulleys on your axis rods, or on the motor itself. Are your shifts left to right or front and back?

Also, is your XY axis well-lubricated? Does the printhead move freely if you try to move it by hand with the machine powered off?

Use the 2mm allen key that came with your printer to check all the set screws in the rods on the pulleys and make sure they're tight. If they are, go ahead and try to home your head with Maintenance --> Advanced --> Home Head. It should home to the back left corner. Once it gets there, it should be locked in place. Try to move it forward, and try to move it to right. If you can move it in either direction when the motor is locked in place, then the pulley on the motor itself is loose (or the pulley attached to the short belt on the rod for the X motor). There are instructions here for accessing the motor pulley to tighten it.

 

Hey thanks, for the suggestions. The printer is for student use in a university library, so we have an IT department that handles all the maintenance for it. Because of it, we're not really allowed to check all that stuff ourselves, I just wanted to see if that's what fixed the original poster's question/issue.

As far as I can tell everything is well lubricated, and the print head does move fairly easily when the machine is off. The shifts are occurring left to right, pretty much exclusively. Could there be any software issues causing this? Since we got the printer we were using the 15.06.03 beta version, and weren't having any issues. Sometime in the recent weeks though we switched to the 2.1.1 64 bit beta, but the shifting wasn't really occurring when we switched versions.

Thanks for the help.

[Help: one axis starts shifting in middle of print]

Olivierc,

Did tightening the pulleys ever solve that shifting issue you were having? We've got an utli-2 extended that's been having the same issue, despite our IT guys saying it's been fixed, now several times... It's happened on a few different prints, and a few different times. We've also checked the files, and there aren't any geometry issues with them either..

I realize this post was from a while ago, but I'm not really seeing anything current with the same/similar issues.