The Ender 3D is an amazing beginner, printer, and should teach you lots of things about the basics of 3-D printing. But after multiple failed attempts on our Ender 3-D printer, the kids basically gave up on it, and it was lying, unused. Talking to my colleagues about 3D printing, suddenly gave me the motivation to see if I could debug and fix the printer.
With that, I started going down the rabbit hole of the issues we were facing on the printer and how, using the advice from the Internet, I could go about fixing the issues and getting it to consistently print at high-quality.
After spending many hours, trying to tweak various settings on the printer here are some hardware fixes. I have ended up doing which has made the printer perform better.
GLUE
I cannot mention the number of times we printed on the Ender 3-D only to see stuff all over the place unattached to the print bed. No matter what settings we chose it just wouldn’t stay stuck! Eventually, we found out that people were using hairspray or glue as options to get the print to stay stuck on the print bed. In our case, hairspray did not work, but gentle application using a glue stick has done wonders, and has consistently ensured that the print stays stuck to the print bed during the entire process.
PS: After you use glue a few times, you will start seeing some residue buildup, you don’t need to buy a new print bed when this happens. Just wash the print bed under regular water and give it a good cleaning with a paper towel and the glue will go away and leave you with a print bed that is good as new.
WOBBLY PRINT BED
I hadn’t touched the print bed since install installation. I would just print things once in a while. I started noticing that there was a bit of a play or wobbliness in the print bed and started researching why that might be the case and how I could fix it. On the end 3-D on the right side there are two nuts that are eccentric and you don’t have to dismantle the whole printer. All you need to do is twist the nuts a little bit clockwise or anticlockwise as the case might be till you get to the point where the print bed is not wobbly anymore this was actually a pretty easy fix once I figured the root cause.
ALIGNING THE PRINT NOZZLE
Another one of those little things that can make or break the print is improper gap between the nozzle and the print bed. Make sure it is around a paper thickness, and the print bed is flat. I do have a existing situation here when my printer is not completely flat, but I use the four adjustment screws on the four corners of the print bed to align the nozzle. Such that at no point is the nozzle touching the print bed and that ensures that I’m not melting the print bed and there is enough clearance for the print material to flow through. Right now, I am using a two piece magnetic print pad. Seems to be doing OK.
NOZZLE CLEANING
To be thorough and making sure I don’t miss anything. I gave the nozzle and the housing a thorough cleaning. Reading online it appears that we should be able to use the nozzles for a considerable amount of time without needing to replace it as long as we can squeeze the filament through it as a test it should be OK.
UPGRADE THE BOWDEN TUBE
This was a harder one for us to figure out. We kept running into the situation where after a certain amount of time printing, we would hear a clicking sound. The gears and the retraction mechanism would be on the fritz and the filament would get completely chewed up. We tried different build speeds, different retraction settings, and nothing seem to work. We looked online and a lot of the suggestions were not applicable.
Finally, we came across an article on the Bowden tube and that got us thinking about the physics of it. I believe what is happening is as the original Bowden tube ages, its characteristics get all weird, and at some point during the repeat retractions the tube gets blocked. This effectively prevents the material from getting pushed out. This is where the gears try to push the material to the nozzle, but the Bowden tube prevents it from going forward and as a result, the filament starts getting chewed up and you start hearing that clicking sound from the feed gears. The fix to it was to remove the couplings on the two end and replace it with a higher quality Bowden tube.
Here are my first couple of printouts after making the above changes. I’m going to try printing a few other things, to see if the changes have made the printer reliable. If not, it’s back to the debugging board to see what other causes there could be for repeated failed printouts.
FAIL…
OK, back to the drawing board now. Not sure what’s happening here. I have glued the print bed and put in a brand new filament and it’s just not sticking. The only thing I can think of is the nozzle temperature is not right or there is some kind of a print setting that is not being done properly. Maybe a fault with the nozzle sensor causing the filament to not be heated optimally. I am going to first try a higher temperature for the print (220) and see how it goes, after that … I dont know yet… will have to search online and seeing what the problem could be.
Worst case, I might have to replace the nozzle unit with an upgraded one since at this point I feel like I have done the other things that I could.
Ok, that’s embarrassing!!! I had not properly reset the distance between the nozzle and the print bed. I have gone ahead and reset it and the print is looking much better now. A bit stringy, will lower the temperature back to 200 and give it a try again.
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