Material Feeder skipping

[oliver-fueckert 0]

Hi Guys,

I just received my new assembled Ultimaker yesterday.

I see some issues with the feeder:

It makes nasty noises and the stepper skips when printing:

http://youtu.be/hqWTmWU1I24

Latest firmware, Orange Filament which came with my printer (measured 2.89m), printing the factory robot model that came on the SD card. The print come out extremely brittle because not enough PLA gets extruded.

I have scanned the forum and tried the following things:

1) Heated the Extruder (230), turned off the steppers and handfed the PLA by moving the feeder wheel by hand. The filament extruded just fine with not a lot of friction.

2) I removed the wooden feeder wheel and used the Cura 'Extrude' button to move the stepper without load. Even this leads to clicking noise, and when I even give the slightest resistance to the cog-wheel it skips.

Is this a stepper/controller issue ?

best regards,

Oliver.

 

[illuminarti 18]

It sounds like it may be, yes. I'd recommend opening a ticket with UM support. They can probably walk you through more testing, and/or adjusting the stepper driver current.

 

[oliver-fueckert 0]

Thank you for the super-fast reply!

I guess writing a forum post is therepeutic. After asking the question, it led me to further check the controller board. And this is what I found:

http://imgur.com/okc2BSi

During transport the cooler-unit had fallen off and mangled the potentiometer of the controller board. After swapping the driver pcb with one of the other ones it extrudes just fine.

Thank-you (not) DHL...

I will contact support for a replacement.

Happy printing everybody!

Ollie.

 

[gr5 2,167]

There's probably nothing wrong electrically with that stepper driver other than that the potentiometer got turned slightly. You might want to just bend it back with pliers and try to adjust it (there's instructions at ultimaker wiki).

I don't think I've ever heard a clicking anything like that before.