Large flat surfaces cause clogs, other prints work fine.

[Tsukomo 1]

I have consistent success with small prints like a chess piece or the ultimaker robot. Even longer prints of several small pieces like the coffin's cube that came on the ultimaker SD card print flawlessly. In the past I have had fairly consistent success with printing items like cell phone cases which have large flat surfaces and experienced occasional clogs but after a quick clean up and restart the print would normally come out fine.

More recently however when printing a large flat surface the hot end becomes clogged and often very early into the print. When the clog is removed it usually looks something like this:

The result in the print looks something like this:

You can see on the left hand side how the material becomes thin and inconsistent as the material begins to clog and the flow slows and eventually stops completely.

I am having a hard time understanding why this occurs seemingly only under these circumstances or figuring out how to avoid or fix the problem.

All of these models have been been sliced through Cura's quickprint settings.

I am using gizmodorks 2.85mm PLA and have had many successful prints with this material. However I did not encounter these issues ever when using the ultimaker PLA.

Any help with this issue would be greatly appreciated. I work in a high school and this is our only 3D printer so having it fully operational and working on all of our projects as soon as possible is essential. Thank you in advance to anyone who takes the time to give it a look.

[DidierKlein 729]

Hi,

Maybe your build plate is a bit to high, and the feeder is having a hard time pushing the filament due to added pressure. The filament is probably grinded a bit and at a certain point the filament won't move properly. The feeder is probably skipping a lot (tack sound on the back)?

You can fine tune the build plate level during the print (best during the print of the brim or the skirt). Simply turn the 3 level screws until you have a nice first layer it must be squished but not too much, if it's almost transparent you are too close, if it's rounded and not well layed you are too high.

[Tsukomo 1]

Hi,

Maybe your build plate is a bit to high, and the feeder is having a hard time pushing the filament due to added pressure. The filament is probably grinded a bit and at a certain point the filament won't move properly. The feeder is probably skipping a lot (tack sound on the back)?

You can fine tune the build plate level during the print (best during the print of the brim or the skirt). Simply turn the 3 level screws until you have a nice first layer it must be squished but not too much, if it's almost transparent you are too close, if it's rounded and not well layed you are too high.

 

Wow, clearly my summer vacation has dulled my wits... normally this would have been the first thing I tried and somehow I didn't even consider that this could be the cause. I just re-leveled the printing bed and the first layer looks flawless. So far so good. Thanks so much for helping me re-discover what should have been an obvious solution.