Extruder Problems

[origin 0]

This has been a very frustrating process for me. We first received our Ultimaker 2 around March. It's made some fairly decent prints for us but has been out of commission for the past 2-3 months due to extrusion issues.

The splined shaft that drives the filament has been skipping. As of today I cannot even load PLA(i.e. load it through the nozzle), it just skips. I can manually push PLA through the nozzle by hand but it is quite tough.

I have reseated the Bowden using Illuminarti's method as well as tried adjusting the tensioner on the extruding motor. I have cleaned out the nozzle by heating it up to 230C pushing some PLA in and letting it cool to 60C, then removing the plug. I noticed some buildup so I did it 5 times until the buildup was gone but still can't load material.

Can anyone offer suggestions?

Thank you,

Nick

 

[wheeler 0]

Hello Origin

I have been working with a UM2 and have had a bit of a problem with the extruder under extruding and stopping.

One of the problems was with the filament the client purchased it was 3mm abs and it seems that the UM2 likes 2.85mm filament, add to this the tube to the extruder is just about about 3.1mm and it does a curve, I think this causes the hole size effectively to reduce a bit and then this adds to the friction of the filament, this is also not helped by the teeth marks made by extruder gear (don't get me wrong I like the gear it is well designed).

Anyhow it could be worthwhile measuring the filament and also running it through the tube by hand to check how much friction you get, then load a length through the drive assembly to see if this increases the friction.

If you get a bigger tube you will have problems extruding as it will have an added slackness to the system.

If the filament is the correct size and has low friction you could try modifying the start code to increase the amount of filament that is purged before the job starts (You may need to set Cura to use gcode as I have not found away to do this in UliGCode yet - the purge length seem to be built in)

hope this is of help

Andrew