Black ABS Fails

Hello Community!

First post, new R1 owner.
I've had my Robo R1 for just around 2.5 weeks. Only have time to work with it on weekends, but I've had great success working through issues and getting it dialed in with great prints with both PLA and ABS. Lovin it!

One issue though. Black ABS, I only have one spool, just refused to print. It absolutely will not extrude fast enough for the Hobbed bolt. It almost acts as if its to brittle and the force of pushing it through the extruder breaks it off. When it breaks off, the Hobbed bolt just pushes it out the side and it curls around in the air.

The back story is that 2 weeks ago it worked fine with black ABS, but half way through the print, it stopped printing and moving completely and I had to start over, shutting down the printer and restarting Matter Control. Starting over it did the same thing but at a different point this time.
Now it might get through the outside preprint layer, but thats about it. Any other color of ABS, I have Red and Gray, work absolutely fine. They are from the same vendor too.
I gave up since I had a lot of real work at my job that week.

Also, my black ABS works fine in my UP! Mini 3d printer as well. I have also tried using 260C on my Robo R1 like my UP! Mini uses as well with the same results. I have also dialed down my extrusion speed as far as I could in Matter Control as well.

I have the new Hexagon head and the latest R1 version as well if that helps.

Any ideas are appreciated. Thanks!

 

I spend so far weeks now to get my 2nd hand 2013 ROBO printing nicely ABS and PLA - ABS worked sometimes well, PLA not at all.
I upgraded to the E3D V6 Hotend, etc., etc. some prints/layers came out very nice (perfect), but most prints so far for the garbage due to extruding problems in the middle of the print... Anyway I´m happy as I have now definetely defined the stock hobbed bolt as unreliable bottle neck - slipping during extruding over the filament.
Have now ordered two 3rd party hobbed bolts for testing and am very confident that this will solve the final issues I have with the ROBO 3D.

Maybe your hobbed bolt is slipping also over the filament after some time?

Br,

Matthias

 

Thanks guys for your advice, unfortunately this has devolved into both abs and pla complete failures.
I didn't have until now to try your advice and bake the abs. I did that and the failures still happened.
Actually it was weirder this time. I could manually push it through the extruder by hand before, but now I can only do that for a second and then it jams up. As a test I tried it with pla as well and it jammed up within a second as well.
Here is a photo of what is happening. It seems to melt in the extruder, but then wraps around the feed tube at the top and then jams up.
I have tried high and low temps with the same result.
any advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Jason

 

Thanks Mark. You were absolutely spot on.
I hadn't noticed, but both cooling fans have completely stopped working. The small one for the hot end and the larger surface fan.
Heating the hot end from cold the filament goes through fine until the heat creep happens.

I traced both fan's wiring to the Arduino board looking for loose connections and the like and everything is fine.
Testing the voltage at the connection shows .03v so obviously minimal ambient power, not ramping up for cooling.

At least now I know it's not the filament.
Just need to figure out why both fans would just quit working. They aren't disabled in MatterControl.

 

Update.
Well I figured out that the larger surface area fan only kicked on when it was actually printing. So that's working fine.
The hot end fan is now working as well, once I removed it.
The issue had to do with filament coming out of the top of the hot end and pressing against the fan stopping it from working.
Here is the pic. Now to figure that one out.

 

So, luckily I didn't have a bolt missing, but I did have melted filament leaking out of both the top of the hot end and where the tip screws onto the block. Unfortunately I had to destroy the rubber boot on the block to clean all the leaked filament off. Then of course there was glue all over the block from the rubber boot as well.
I soaked the hexagon head in Weldon 3 for a couple of hours and was able to clear away all the glue and filament from the outside, and clear out the clogged filament in the guide shaft.
I didn't have a wrench small enough to reach underneath the heatsink to tighten the small guideshaft bolt on the top of the block, so I was only able to tighten the tip itself. I was able to get it a full 1/4 turn tighter and now there are no leaks at all
I've printed a few items with PLA and so far so good.
Will give ABS the old college try again this afternoon.

 

So my ABS Failures continued as they had originally in my initial post. Except it wasn't only black, it was all of my ABS filament failing.
It was obvious that the extruder was overrunning the hot ends ability to extrude the ABS. No matter how far I dialed it back, or how much heat I gave the ABS, the hot end couldn't keep up.
About 20 minutes ago, I changed the Slice Engine from Slic3r to CuraEngine, and now it's printing the ABS no problem.
Hopefully I will be updating with success once it completes, but so far so good.

 

First off, sorry for the long wait for my next post. Real life work has kept me from continuing my troubleshooting.

So, CuraEngine seemed to work, but it ended in failure as well, unfortunately.
I have come to the conclusion that the cold end of the Hexagon, cannot keep ABS cool enough to keep it from getting soft and breaking just below the hobbed bolt during extrusion. Especially since this is only happening after there has been enough time for heat creep to occur up into the cold end.

So, my first order of business was to replace the stock heatsink cooling fan with a new one. Well this ended in failure as well.
So, now I have decided that the tiny cooling fan that gets supplied with the Hexagon, just may not be enough for some applications.
I have concluded this, since my ABS prints perfectly on my UP! mini 3d printer and PLA prints perfectly on my ROBO R1.
It also prints just fine on my ROBO R1 if the ROBO has been powered off for a while and starts off completely cold. That is until the cold end heats up, where no prints will complete, unless they are really small, short prints.

To remedy this, I have modeled, and am now printing in PLA on my ROBO R1, a multipart fan duct system to install a much larger fan that cools the Hexagon heatsink and will hopefully keep the cold section cool enough to not soften the ABS filament.

Hopefully I will be posting positive results from that test.

 

Success!! As you can see in the pics, I have designed and printed a new heatsink cooling fan duct system for a much larger cooling fan for the Hexagon hot end.
Once designed, I printed this in PLA and installed the much larger fan. As you can see, I am now printing new parts in Black ABS, with which I have continuously had issues printing, but no longer.
The reason I am reprinting the parts, is because although functional and now allowing me to print with ABS without issue, I have already made improvements to the duct system models, so I am printing those to install and test.
Once these have been finalized, I will upload these to Thingiverse and link them here for others to use as well.