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Tyler's printer

Discussion in 'Show and Tell' started by TylerJones4292, Dec 20, 2013.

  1. SteveC

    SteveC Well-Known Member

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    Tyler,
    Shooting in the dark here with some suggestions.
    • Are you sure the X set screw is set into one of the flat portions of the stepper shaft and not the round?
    • Is there any binding when you move the X carriage by hand?
    • Is it possible that the filament or wire harness got caught on something at that layer?
    Kind of a coincidence that the shift happened exactly when the layers changed to that smaller area. The only other thing I can think of is the stepper driver strength pot setting. Can you try moving the X side to side with the Repetier (or Mattercontrol) manual control while putting a small resistance on the carriage with your hand. Look for skipping. If it is skipping easily then look at the driver power setting. There is a link on the forums that I'll look for.

    Nice print!
     
  2. TylerJones4292

    TylerJones4292 New Member

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    Yesterday I tried my first print in over a month, and I'm still getting occasional slips in the x axis. To answer @SteveC's questions as well as the common solutions most people suggest for x axis problems:
    - the x set screws are tight and set with threadlocker and are on the correct flat portion of the stepper shaft. I don't think these were ever the problem as they were tight to begin with and I'm still getting slips after setting them
    - the x belt is tight and has a tightener on it. It twangs a bit but not super sharply.
    - it's unlikely that any wires or filament are getting caught on anything. There's not much to get caught on in the first place, and I have my spool mounted above the printer so there is very low resistance pulling new filament.
    - when the stepper motors are on I can't move the carriage by hand and didn't notice any slipping
    - there is no 'play' side to side in the nozzle. I used to have a small problem with one of the two bolts holding the x carriage in place was loose, and another where the two bolts holding the nozzle to the carriage were loose, but it's all tight now.
    - there is slightly uneven resistance when I slide the x carriage across the bar by hand with the motors off, but it still moves easily and doesn't bind or catch anywhere.

    I'm going to try and record a video of a test print so maybe I can catch what's going wrong next time.
     
  3. SteveC

    SteveC Well-Known Member

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    Do the X slips still correlate with the geometry of the model like in your last photo or is it random? I'm out of the obvious ideas right now. Random ideas... Do you still have the heat sinks on all the stepper drivers. They fall off pretty easily. You cold try swapping the X stepper driver with another one. The linear bearing can sometimes be a bit flakey and perhaps one is sticking but rarely. That uneven resistance can mean that some of the ball bearings are binding on something. Have you ever had the X carriage off of the rails? The ball bearings can even fall out if you are not careful putting the rod in. I'm sure someone else will have some other ideas. Good luck!
     
  4. tesseract

    tesseract Moderator
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    The only other thing I can think of is the voltage and Amps driving the motors it could be on the verge of skipping and only does so intermittently
    I would check the voltages and adjust the pots on the drivers if needed. Depending on several things check the voltage on the stepper drivers may be easier or hard and may require you to upload a pic of yours, as things are changing in that area, so we can see where you need to check from if you do not know.

    A very quick test although not very accurate is the motor temp when running it should be just on the warm side but not hot and not just room temp either if it is room temp, the voltage is a bit low if it is hot then it could be a bit high on the voltage.
     
  5. TylerJones4292

    TylerJones4292 New Member

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    @SteveC Hard to say about the slips. Some seem to correlate with the geometry, some don't. I haven't done enough testing to be sure.
    Regarding the heat sinks, what am I looking for? And no, I haven't taken the X carriage off the rails before.

    @tesseract How do I check/change the voltages? I'm using a reprapdiscount XXL LCD, for the record, and haven't changed any settings that I can recall.
    On one of my last prints I did check the heat of the stepper motor and it was warm but definitely not hot.
     
  6. William

    William New Member

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    If this is too obvious or you've already tried this, just ignore it... Have you check to see if the set screw on the "pulley" for the belt on the motor is tight?
     
    3 people like this.
  7. Peter Krska

    Peter Krska Active Member

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    Check the motors underneath and see if they can be shifted. I crazy glued mine to the housing, since the screws were tight already but you could move the motor slightly.


    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk in Canada
     
  8. SteveC

    SteveC Well-Known Member

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    Also putting washers on the Y stepper motor screws can allow them to be tightened more. I would use locktite on the housing.
     
  9. SteveC

    SteveC Well-Known Member

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    The heat sinks are the black (or aluminum) finned things stuck with double sided sticky tape to the four modules plugged into the RAMPS board. Sometimes they pop off and can be stuck back on. They act as heat radiators to keep the stepper driver chip cool.
    RAMPS_PAcomplete_1.4.jpg
     
  10. SteveC

    SteveC Well-Known Member

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    The stepper motor body can get very hot to touch without affecting it's function. So that is probably not the problem. I was just looking to see if there was some sort strange failure in the stepper winding.

    If the the stepper driver modules get too hot they will momentarily shut down until they cool off.
     
  11. TylerJones4292

    TylerJones4292 New Member

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    Thanks for the replies, everyone.

    @SteveC The heat sinks are all in place. Also regarding the Y motor advice, I've never had problems with accuracy in the Y axis, so I'm not about to go fixing something that's not broke!

    @Peter Krska The x stepper motor is quite securely in place as is.
     
  12. TylerJones4292

    TylerJones4292 New Member

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    I've made a few more prints since my last post with much better results. I have a hunch that the slips were happening during the travel moves, so I turned down the travel speed from 130 to 110. The things I have been printing also haven't involved much travel, being only single solid pieces. I'm a little wary of going back to multi-part prints but there's no progress without experimentation.

    I've also finally tried out the ColorFabb PLA/PHA sample pack that I got from @PrintedSolid a while ago and it's really great filament. It hasn't jammed and the print quality on the few things I've made are as good as I could possibly hope for. One of those things I made is a filament wiper/oiler so hopefully with it the regular filament I still have won't jam as much.
     
  13. SteveC

    SteveC Well-Known Member

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    My travel is set at 130 and I have done some but not a large number of multipart prints.

    I really like my colorfab spools. The colors are really saturated and it has a nice flexibility.
     
  14. TylerJones4292

    TylerJones4292 New Member

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    Things have been printing pretty well recently. I think that the cause of those persistent x-slips has been the nozzle bumping into irregularities on the surface and being nudged to the side. That's probably why a lot of my second layers were slightly off from the first; because the first layer sometimes comes out rough as I do a little dynamic leveling. I'm not sure how I got such a big slip on that earlier woodfill part, but the woodfill did give me some pretty noticeable globs and a pretty bad jam one time, so I'm not ruling it out as a possibility.
     
  15. TylerJones4292

    TylerJones4292 New Member

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    I'm having a strange problem with prints now. I'm using a 0.8mm nozzle, which I've used before successfully, and some dark blue/grey ColorFabb filament from @PrintedSolid, which is new. The first layers go down well enough but when it gets to the infill the lines are broken. It causes problems almost right away and the prints have to be thrown out.

    Any ideas on this? Other than the filament I'm not doing anything new, and ColorFabb has always played really nice with my printer in the past.
     

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  16. Peter Krska

    Peter Krska Active Member

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    Try different filament and see if it makes a difference.



    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk in Canada
     
  17. TylerJones4292

    TylerJones4292 New Member

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    I tried some regular grey PLA and it still seemed to be happening but not quite as badly. I think I need to slow down the infill speed because at 0.3mm layer height and with a 0.8mm nozzle it's just trying to push too much filament through too quickly and failing. Also I've re-leveled my bed as that was causing slight problems.
     

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