Yet another maintenance - with a twist

We were fighting with this continuous filamentThis is the plastic which is used as a source for the printRead more sticking, so we thought maybe a good cleaning of the hobbed bar could help solve our problem.

As it turned out the hobbed bar was truly filled with plastic grain, but that was not a big surprise as it was not cleaned since we built the printer eight months ago. The biggest surprise was the lots of broken teeth on the bar. We knew the PLA is a really hard plastic, but never though it could damage the bronze bar. But it did, evidently.

Unfortunately this cleaning didn't solve the problem, so we were waiting for the new stronger motor to arrive.

When the motor had arrived, it turned out it is exactly the same type we have. We still replaced it with the new one, just to be sure, because we suspected the motor may weakened during all those sticking period, but we were not sure this will solve the problem as our first test print have had a lot of problems...

So we started to look for a stronger motor to order again, even though that would mean we have to wait a few weeks again to the motor to arrive. And during that search we realised there are a few different kind of motors there, and all of them have a different input voltage range from 2.5V to 12V. It hit us that we never tuned our motor drivers to work with our motors - so all of them were set to the factory default: the lowest possible. Which means we supplied our motors with 2.5V instead of the necessary 3.6V, as it turned out our motors have a 3.6V input.

The motor was really weak, but not because it had any problems, or it was not strong enough for our printer. We forgot the basic thing, tuning the drivers... The conclusion is simple: we are still newbies in the 3D pringing business...