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I've done a fair bit of looking around for an answer and have yet been unable to find one.

So here is my problem, after about 200-300 mm of extrusion, the PLA stops coming through the nozzle. When I pull the PLA out it looks like this. There are teeth marks going up the PLA and end with a small divot. The head of the PLA is slightly thicker than the rest of the PLA; approximately 1.9 mm.

Filament shape after taken out of hotend

I first noticed this when I thought that only the bottom layer was being printed. I moved to printing a small bullet and I got about halfway through the print before it stopped extruding.

Next I raised the Z position to about 100 mm to give me some room to work and I manually moved the PLA through the extruder with the dial. No problems until I hit the 200 mm mark or so. I've done this test 4 times now and failed at the approximate locations: 208 mm, 280 mm, 250 mm, and 325 mm.

Settings:

  1. Nozzle: 200 °C
  2. Bed: 60 °C
  3. Layer Height: 0.15 mm

Other things I have tried with seemingly no effect:

  • Turning off/on print cooling
  • reducing retraction to 2 mm from 6 mm
  • yelling out in frustration
  • reformatting the SD card (because who knows?)
  • brand new filament, older filament, middle aged filament
0scar
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Nate4436271
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1 Answers1

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Looking at the tread pattern on the filament, I think it's getting stuck. Note that the teeth marks get closer together as you go up the fillament, and the last one is a big divot, that looks like the gear trying to grab at it, and being unable to move it.

Are you seeing any drops in nozzle temp? I had a cooling fan kick in and drop temps low enough to prevent extrusion before.

Edit

From the discussion in the notes, heat creep was identified as a possible culprit, and seems most likely.

kolosy
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