Unanswered Practically 100% failure rate with longer (>1 hour) prints for various reasons.

I've had my robo3d r1 +plus for about 2 weeks now. It's been pretty great, and I've enjoyed making and printing stuff a lot. The thing is though the machine, as a whole, seems really unstable. More or less every print I've done that is over 1 hour has failed, and for different reasons too. A few examples are that the filament simply fail to move at some point during a print and it simply doesn't print (I have to take off the head and work on it to fix that), the head crashes (I believe this is the most frequent), the head seems to come a tad off in one axis or another (it has happened with x and y but only once a piece) and the plastic did not stick to itself well enough. I'd say about 1/10 prints lasting >1 hour have actually printed acceptably (not necessarily completed or perfectly detailed). I can only think of one that has actually printed successfully all the way. I use mattercontrol for it's simplicity at the moment and I have altered between a reprapdiscount full graphic display and just plugging the printer into my computer. Now I'm not really looking for how to fix these at the moment, but rather if the machine should be expected to fail like this. If the larger the print the more likely it is to fail by that much.

And what seems odd is I've only seen one or two shorter prints fail. As far as I can tell the printer is in a good environment and it doesn't seem damaged or incorrectly made in any way. I keep all air stationary and relatively warm while printing. It is on a level and sturdy table.I use kid's glue to adhere the plastic to the plate and I clean it with a small bit of water and a towel after every print. I can't see what's going wrong, if anything. Just wondering if, as I said, this is to be somewhat expected.

 

Checking the fans is a good start.
I would also suspect calibration issues. They might not be noticeable in small prints, but when you print big they will.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

In reply to the first two of you, Geof and TomerO, yes the fans appear to always be spinning. Sometimes they make grinding noises but it seems like most small fans do that occasionally and it goes away after a minute or so.

To mark, the first video may be helpful and I'll probably do what he did and run the level checking commands. The second video gave me the idea to add an oiler, which I just downloaded one of and will print later.

As for the other problems such as plastic not sticking I'm not sure what to do still.

 

Here are some pictures. I added some information to the imgur descriptions, so read those. Unfortunately I don't have many more because I threw them all out. Also, I'd like to add a bit in case it's useful. Whenever I print out a set of stuff, a bunch of parts all meant to be printed at once and later assembled, it has always failed. But when I printed them individually, even completely back to back, there have been no problems. It seems like the actual length of the print seems to cause problems.

Also, I've heard what you're saying previously mark. I never leave it alone without watching the first couple layers to make sure they go down. I also put on a copious amount of glue (washable kid's glue from a stick) immediately before each print. What I do is when the printer starts calibrating right before a print, I hit pause on the LCD controller. The pause is buffered to between the end of the calibration and start of the print since the calibration process is just one command. This is when I apply glue so it hasn't dried by the time it starts. Then I unpause it and let it go. Also I have only used PLA so far and plan on continuing doing so.

 

I'm making a model in blender right now that will be 1 layer. I'll print out the oiler afterward. I'll post once I've done the single layer print.

 

Here it is. Running my finger over it with some force doesn't pick it up. It is completely stuck down.

 

Why is it missing so much on the inside. Is that by design?

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

Erm, I'm not sure. It's solid on the inside, the model looks like the included picture.
They are solid however. A few of the letters actually sprung away when I tried scraping them off ha ha.

I'll try that circle now.