Ender 3 Pro Broken Extruder Arm

RE: Ender 3 Pro Broken Extruder Arm

ntewinkel — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 22:59:07 GMT

Successful cat print with the gold filament too [emoticon:c4563cd7d5574777a71c318021cbbcc8]

RE: Ender 3 Pro Broken Extruder Arm

ntewinkel — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 05:14:51 GMT

Here is a before and after (replacing the broken extruder), of the black Multicomp PLA I was struggling with. This new PLA was the reason I started my step by step "debugging" of my 3D printing issues.

A couple of take-aways from this:

- Amazingly, temperature does NOT make as big a difference as I thought it would! For this new test tower all of the increments look solid, and it's hard to find one that might be better than the others. This stuff looks to be very forgiving.

- What I thought was a low-temperature problem on the first heat-tower was actually an under-extrusion problem caused by the broken extruder arm.

- So yes, the problem was definitely due to that broken extruder arm!

This PLA is rated 205-225 degC, so that wasn't the ideal test tower, as it doesn't go beyond 220. At this point, I don't feel the need to test it further - I'll probably pick a middle of the road temperature and go with it.

I'm not sure if it's worth continuing my detailed testing of the rest of the filaments, as I think the main issue has been resolved, and these PLA filaments seem happy at a wide range of temperatures.
As long as the prints hold solidly together and look ok, I think that's all I need at this time.

I'll probably print a few cats next, for the remainder of the testing [emoticon:6d505171faa4497c85c5ca27290c555d] [emoticon:306d03dbe5e641c49f6fc52818714937]

RE: Ender 3 Pro Broken Extruder Arm

dougw — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 05:03:13 GMT

It surprises me that some printers use plastic parts and even 3D printed parts in fairly critical components of machines that are intended to run with precision for days on end.

RE: Ender 3 Pro Broken Extruder Arm

rsjawale24 — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 02:51:20 GMT

Great! So the problem was with the extruder arm. Who would have thought that! Need to check mine as well lol

Heat towers are a good way to test your filament temperature. Whenever I get a new filament, I print a tower to determine it's correct temperature setting.

RE: Ender 3 Pro Broken Extruder Arm

ntewinkel — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 02:02:21 GMT

Success!

So that was definitely a problem. I just printed the little black box at 0.2mm and it came it really nice. very solid. The last time I tried it at 0.2 it was a stringy mess that fell apart with a slight touch. Might be a little hard to tell in this picture, but the bottom is properly solid too, where previously it was like a see-through mesh. I'm printing the heat tower for it next, to see how that looks.