Stops Extruding Mid-Print (Tried everything I could think of)

[Slashee_the_Cow 279]

@GregValiant pretty similar to mine. Also before I had my E3V3SE I did have an E3V2 Neo until some shoddy filament killed it. The only time it just plain stopped printing and did the midair dance was when said shoddy filament clogged the Bowden tube so badly it basically just melted and became one with it (it was a multi-hour print that failed about 45 minutes in, well after I'd stopped watching to make sure it adhered and started well).

 

So some free, hopefully unrelated advice: if you ever pull out the Bowden tube to see if it's clogged, and it looks like this:

Then take the cover off the hot end assembly and make sure it hasn't melted the rubber boot around the hot end to the point where it's almost falling off... or in my case, being held on by filament from the next thing I printed because it was loose enough that the hot end just got covered in plastic. Broke one of the wires to the thermistor when it set and bam, printer don't wanna print no more.

 

Sadly I think I also have a picture which illustrates Greg's "accordion" example:

I should have taken that as a sign not to use that filament. That filament which thoroughly clogged my hot end after another couple of prints with it (and yes I did cut off the bit that got chewed up).

 

Anyway, back to the actual problem: it might be about as interesting as watching paint dry but do a print where you know it's gonna fail and keep your eyes mostly glued to the extruder. When it stops printing and starts doing the air dance, see if it looks like the extruder is even trying to feed it through. Pause the print, hold down the little lever and pull the filament back a bit (enough so you can see it in the tube) and then resume and see if the extruder feeds it through.

 

Also while it's doing an air dance, try not holding the little lever (and not pausing) and give the filament a bit of a tug where it goes into the extruder. It should put up enough of a fight that it doesn't move at all. If the extruder does resume feeding after you manually retract it a bit and you can't tug it while it's trying to print, then it's probably not the extruder.

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• Are you printing from an SD card or over USB (either from your computer or using something like OctoPrint)? Prints from an SD card are generally less likely to fail.
• If you can avoid it, don't use either the card or the card reader that came with it. They're both crap which failed within a week for me. Problem is that according to my reading it only really likes cards that are 4-16GB and it's hard to find them that small these days (not a problem for a gadget nerd like me, I find cards I didn't know I even had sometimes). If you don't have one, find the smallest capacity one you have (or buy one on Amazon and take advantage of their generous returns policy if necessary).
• Have you updated the firmware, if it doesn't already have the latest version (you should be able to check which version in the menus)? The latest version was released at the start of June last year and is version... I don't know how the hell Creality number their firmware updates. The update page is here and you almost certainly want this one, unless it only gave you the option of English or Japanese when you were setting it up (in which case you want the one above it)... I made that mistake and wondered why the hell it wasn't working:
  
  • When it says to update the display firmware the card slot is on the back of the screen, it means it pretty literally: you'll need to pull it out of the holder bit you screwed onto the printer (just push it back and upwards a bit) and unscrew the back cover, because the card slot is literally on the back of the screen's motherboard.
• Have you tried slicing a file in Creality Print (you can get it from the same download page) to see if that works?
  • There's Creality Print and Creality Slicer. I think(?) Print is the newer one. They're both forks of Cura, just different versions.