Prints fail halfway through, but hotend isn't clogged.

So I recently built a new printer and I've noticed some really weird behavior
I will start a 3d benchy boat and it will go strong halfway through, then suddenly it will just clog up.
I thought it might be my retraction settings, so removed all retraction and it still happened.

Upon examining the direct drive extruder, I noticed I could lightly push the filament through by hand and the filament flowed freely through the hotend. More importantly, it flowed straight after leaving the hotend which makes me believe there isn't a clog.

What could cause this behavior? I'm printing pla at 210C from Meltink, and the filament is good quality. I'm also using a mk7 filament gear to drive the filament. My fastest print speed is 15mm/s.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/18/2017 09:48AM by WalkerMaker.

Are you driving the printer via USB? Is the computer going to sleep? Is the USB working right?

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Ultra MegaMax Dominator 3D printer: [drmrehorst.blogspot.com]

Yes it's being run through USB and yes I believe it's running right.

Time-based issues are often heating issues.

In this case, I'd look at the temperature of the extruder stepper driver... if it it overheats, then the extruder loses power.

Good idea on cooling the drivers. I'm using a smoothie 5x with 2.0A on each driver, and heatsinking. But still they're hot.

In addition, I think I found the issue. The extruder setup I have might be blocking the bearing from pressing the filament up against the filament gear. Basically the hinge that the bearing swings on is a bit lopsided it looks like, so I'm going to switch to an e3d titan sooner than I thought.

Glad you figured it out.

You could use an enclosure like this that I created for my smoothie. Cools both sides of the board.

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My printer: Raptosaur - Large Format Delta - [www.paulwanamaker.wordpress.com]
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