Having Trouble Printing

d3lt4ONE11 · December 12, 2017

hey guys I'm a brand new rookie to 3d printing. Very excited to learn all the ins and out of it. I'm having some issues with printing right now. Here's a little background and my systems/hardware:

-Alunar M505 printer (prusa i3 clone, cheap DIY printer to learn on)

-Cura 3.1.0 software

-painters tape print bed

-1.75mm PLA filament

After assembling the printer and doing my best to "zero-in" and calibrate the bed and all the axis, I've tired to print out a test print to see the quality/make sure I did everything right. Well here's the thing, I can't get the filament to stick to the print bed. Here's what I've tried to remedy the problem:

-printer has a heat bed, but I just read that heated painters tape does not act as a good adhesive when heated, so I turned off the heat to the bed after which the filament stuck a bit better, but still no go

-I also read that filament not sticking is also a product of an uneven/unlevel bed, well I tried my best to tweak and fine tune this to be as near perfect as possible (being a newbie, maybe I'm still messing something up there but I've tried to level all 4 corners of the bed to a postit note height between bed and nozzle tip)

After this, its still not sticking, and obviously the first few layers are critical to the integrity of the print. One final thought, it seems like the extruder is not putting out enough filament, not sure if this is a common misconception to a rookie or if i need to adjust the speed/output of the filament.

Any help or advice would be GREAT! Thank you in advance for help and patience with me. If it would help, I'm more than happy to provide pics/videos for what I have

d3lt4ONE11 · December 12, 2017

Also one other issue I've just run into is that while trying to print, the filament will get stuck while being fed into the extruder nozzle guide pipe if that makes sense. Is there a way to fix this? I figured it must be something I'm doing wrong or don't know about.

gr5 · December 13, 2017

Do you mean when loading filament? I always cut my filament to a point when loading new filament. But... maybe you mean something else? How do you know it's getting stuck - I mean once the filament starts coming out of the nozzle, when you end a print and start another - it should always work fine - it's already past all the spots where it can get stuck.

Unless you have brittle filament. Could that be it? Often the last meter of filament (that part not around the spool) can get quite brittle, break in the bowden, and get stuck at the print head.

But I suspect you mean something else.

d3lt4ONE11 · December 13, 2017

No loading it isn't the issue, its when its already printing. The reason I know it gets stuck is that filament stops flowing and when I depress the lever to pull out the filament it doesn't move. I took apart the extruder and found that it's getting stuck in the screw tube going into the nozzle head. Is it possible the nozzle is clogged or something?