Solved My filament broke and I cant feed any more in.

Hello everyone, I am a new owner of a Robo 3d R1 Unit and I am very happy so far with my experience.

I am working on a crowdfunding project and I was looking for a 3d printer to print some prototypes, I originally bought an UNASSEMBLED printrbot and it came with no assembly instructions and the video they have on youtube was...incomplete, after spending 2 weeks of nightmare I Returned it and got my money back
(I love Paypal...) and bought a Robo 3d for its big print capacity, attractive price and plug and play, that last feature was very important after my printrbot experience.

I printed some cool upgrades for my Robo 3d R1 easily within 20 min of opening the box!! WOW, talk about plug and play, I fell in love with it right away lol, but this morning while printing another upgrade my filament broke and I was not able to insert any in it, it was like something was in the way.

I really did not want to disassemble my Robo 3d after my previous experience so I opened a ticket and waited
Obviously I am not patient so after watching a dozen of youtube video I decided to go for it, I build my own PC for the last 20 years and always loved playing with legos,

Well it was way simpler then I thought, and I fix it myself, I just want to share some tips with the community because you guys are great in this forum.

I wasn't able to pull it out but I plug it in, raised the temps to 220 and push it through with some filament easily. what's a relief!, all you need to do is disassemble the 2 springed M4 Screws screws that holds the filament latch assembly retainer, and thats it.

Also I was having some challenge getting my filament to stick to my bed, I tried a few trick, hair spar, painters tape, I am still waiting for my 230mm Kapton tape , but I tried this cloth duck tape that I bought at the dollar store!!! WOW, that thing is amazing, I highly recomended and I would love to have some feed back from a more experienced user on that tape, its a very effective surface to print!

Thank you Robo 3d!

Michael K

 

Wait, is it solved?

 

If it isn't then just take these two screws out and then pull the hot end out, remove the filament. That's all.

 

Yes it is solved, I am printing now like new! Thanks for your input.

 

Oh, my bad didn't get to read the entire post, glad you like the printer!

 

I use a different approach that may be easier for some people. I use a wrench to hold the large bolt oposite the drive gear and use my hand to unscrew the big gear. When the gear is off, I pull off the washer, bearing, and remove the bolt and bolt end bearing. Then while holding the retainer back, with the extruder up to temperature, I can usually use a long nose plier and remove the remaining filament, since it breaks at the serrated bolt. The nice thing about this approach is that I can then use an aeroduster to remove all the particles and then carefully clean-out/scrape-out the serrations on the bolt. This seems to be part of the root of the problem; if there is a bunch of debris in the serrated bolt it does not bite into the filament to drive it in to the hot-end, and it can slip and cut the filament. Give it a try.

 

Thanks guys for this post. It's really helped me solve the problem with printing to the end of a filament spool.

It really would be great, if in future versions of the Robo 3D, there would be a mechanism that would pause a print if there was no filament detected, thus allowing you time to add more filament (change out to a new roll). At this stage, you just end up with a failed print at the end of a twenty+ hour print process. It's happened to me several times, and I'm a total noob. Oh well, I'll add it to my wish list!

 

Thanks for replying so quickly Mark. I've read where several 3D Printer manufactures are working on this issue. I'll keep my eyes peeled for a suitable mod. BTW, does anyone make a giant roll of ABS filament? All I can find is the typical 2lb rolls.