Scratched borosilicate bed with extruder, now will not feed

OK, so I was having problems with the Z-axis alignment and I decided it would be a capital idea to mess with it. Apparently I must have set it too low. Initially it fed my ABS without problem, but it wasn't printing. It wasn't until after I tried to print something that I realized the problem was that the head was too low. Now, there are scratches in the center of the bed in the shape of a 50mm Calibration Cube. Is there any way to fix this without replacing the extruder head? I'm fairly certain that they are actually scratches and not just the ABS being stuck to the bed. Once I get home from work today (I'm on a break! I swear!), I'm going to try and use acetone to clean off the bed and find some way to gently slide something across it, just to make sure it actually is a problem with the bed itself, but now it won't even feed the hot thread. I have removed it and confirmed that it does melt the thread very well, it's just not coming out when I try to feed it in. I just got this thing, and I've already messed it up! :<

 

I'm betting they're not scratches but super thinly extruded material. Try running a new razor blade across it.


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try push the filament down to force what might be clogging it, i have done it but they were not scratches. its just very very thin plastic like melody said.

 

I have tried pushing it down to clear the clog, but I'm honestly starting to get worried that I've pushed it so hard that it may have caused another problem. I had been using a pair of pliers to make sure it kept pressure on it. However, I just remembered that shortly before this happened I tried to home the Z-axis and it sounded like something got stuck and it made a loud popping sound before I could reach the power cable in time. I checked and didn't see the bed being cracked or anything like that, but I'm concerned that it may have pushed the head up in to the unit. It doesn't appear to be damaged and it's the same length as it had been before. Also, I am not sure if this helps or not, but I thought the PLA that came with the unit was actually ABS, so I attempted to print with ABS settings which may at least explain why when it hit a certain height the head got stuck and just globbed and got stuck after reaching a certain height on the first print, and I accidentally killed the power mid-print (it was hooked up to a lightswitch because the cable wouldn't reach any other outlets and I couldn't find a power-strip, so I channeled my inner genius who seems to keep shooting himself in the foot at every turn) on the second attempt, which *did* get higher than the first attempt . I doubt that caused any problems because the new roll of ABS fed through fine when I swapped it out.

 

have you tried heating it up by 5 degree stages and try forcing it out. what extruder are you using? stock?

 

Stock extruder. I put it up all the way to 230°, which is the "burn-in temperature" they say to use in the Getting Started Guide, but it still will not clear any clog if there is one.

 

Ah, see that may be it, some people say don't go upto that temp and some say you can, the PTFE tube may have Brocken that causes problems, are you having any plastic leaking from anywhere? The PTFE tube is a small tube that sits inside the note d, if that breaks, cracks or gets blocked...well you would need a new one.

I recently upgraded to the e3d as it does not have this part but as a new member I understand that spending more money is abit annoying. I recommend you get the e3d but in the mean time you could try see if robo 3d will send you a new PTFE tube if that is the part that broke.

*disclamer! I am not a RoBo 3d expert so I am going to ask some other member who are much smarter than me to help out here*

 

Back from work so I can actually try some of these things out. As far as I can tell, the hole is round, so there's that. I tried flossing it out with a length of high E-string like you said (By the way, THANK YOU for that! I was looking all over the house to find something to do that with, but I completely forgot that I have an entire unopened pack of guitar strings! The larger-diameter ones are coated with something according to the packaging, so I'm a little hesitant to push those up in there because it might end up making the problem even worse, if that's possible...), but it didn't fix it. It's definitely getting up in there because it's coming out slightly covered in some of the black filament I initially used. Would it be possible to go the other direction (feeding it like it was regular filament) with it? I also find it strange that the filaments I've used so far are black (fed through without a problem), then blue and then yellow when I couldn't get it to come out, but the tips always come out the exact color they went in with. When I remove them, they're completely melted at the tip so they're definitely getting heat... I waited almost a year to get this thing and I don't want to have to replace the extruder head only a few days after getting it

 

It went through the hot end but it kept bending to the point where I didn't want to worry about them bending inside of the unit and getting stuck or damaging something. And yes, these are Elixir strings.

Honestly, I think I'm just going to upgrade to the E3D like you said. I've heard a lot of good things about it. I'm just really pissed that I've had nothing but problems since I got this thing, and they've all been my fault so I can't even blame it on someone else

 

I FINALLY got it threaded after many, many attempts! I set it to 230° first and flossed with it 5-6 full times. Then I did the same procedure in increments of 5° at a time, down to 205°. The string is still in the extruder and the extruder is still set to 205°. Would doing this down to like... 175° make things better or worse? I didn't want to remove it all the way until I actually got it as close to a functional state as humanly possible lol

 

Also, Melody: You were right on the money! I just scraped it and after a few tries it came right off without a problem. I think I may have torn my cheek muscles from smiling so hard

 

i think that if its working at 205 not much would happen at 175 but you would try it.

BTW what temperature do you print as on average?- you mentions using the ABS setting but those are just standard, you need to find the right temperature for your self.

 

When I thought the short amount of plastic that was given was ABS, I set the burn-in to 230° and went to 210-ish to print. It gummed up after about a centimeter, though. Not sure if that's related, all I know is I was... "perturbed". Since then, I haven't been able to get it to print anything now that I actually have ABS plastic to use. And I already tried putting the length that it comes with back in, but that did not feed either.

 

have you tried heating it up in 5 degree stages and trying? also this may help. get the filament and some sissors and cut the filament at an angle to make it very points, then feed it through. the filament can get stuck on the ridge at the top so make sure it goes down pretty far like an inch.

if you need more help you can contact me on skype: Alex M (soupaboy) <--it should look just like that with a picture of my snake as a profile picture

 

I had just heated it up to 220-230° and tried to feed it and *did* feel it melting slowly, but it still wouldn't go through. Would it be better to just keep trying to feed it in slowly with different temperatures like you suggested? And I'm already looking in to the E3D replacement, so hopefully this will become a moot point shortly...

 

e3d is an upgrade i 100% recommend but yes, adding it at different temps would be good but do small temperature changes. intervals of 5 is what i do