Material Station has issues switching between rolls

[MJ27 0]

Hey Guys!

 

We've had to scrap quite a few prints that required the Material Manager to swap to the next roll of similar filament mid-print. However, we've found out that if we cut off the bend in the end of the filament, our Material Managers have no problem. What we observe is the bend at the end of the filament gets caught and the Material Manager's feeder will just spin out on the filament, causing a non-recoverable error (usually ER59) and scrapping the print.

 

It's also worth noting that we use mostly Ultimaker Tough PLA and Breakaway.

 

It's nice that we can prevent this issue by cutting the filament, but it's very inconvenient as we can'y access the tip at the end of the spool until it very close to being empty. We've had to pause a lot of prints before we leave for the day as the material would run out at some point during the night.

 

Does anybody have another remedy to this, or is Ultimaker planning on doing something to prevent the end of roll from jamming?

[nickp100 1]

Yes we also had the issue. The error thrown scraps the build though as nothing can clear it.

We are also having a lot of issues with loading Ultimaker PVA .

The material changer so far, at least for us, has created a lot more problems than it can potentially solve.

[uncle_bob 21]

Hi

 

If you just happen to catch the beast as it tries to unload:

 

A non-square tail end ( = one that is bent with a bit of a hook to it ...)  on the filament can catch right at the Material Station feed mouth. It sits just inside the thing *almost* out in the open / headed to the spool. The firmware bashes away at the thing to try to get it to move past the point. It may / may not peal off a part of the end of the filament in the process.  Cutting the end of the filament will indeed help with this problem.  However a tapered end (which some rolls have) would be the ideal case.  ( So yes, I have indeed seen the problem and caught it right at the point it was about to fail). 

 

On some of the rolls that I have seen, there is the case of a "pinched" end. This one is not bent. It necks down right as it bends around into the hub of the spool. The result is about 5 to 10 mm of filament that is barely attached to the rest of it. Sometimes it falls off in the "bin" with the spool. Some times it makes it all the way into the system and back out again (still attached). Sometimes it comes out loose. I have a really nasty suspicion there is a case where it gets lost in the internals and jams things up ..... I have zero proof of that. 

 

========

 

After about 10 minutes of carefully guided work / following the instructions from Ultimaker Support, my "A slot" problem is fixed. It was *not* a chunk of filament stuck somewhere. The issue was much simpler ( = loose connection). 

 

Bob

Edited January 29, 2020 by uncle_bob