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Over extrusion during initial filament load wears out the gear if the springs are set too tight.
If you set the spring loose, you may spare the gears but print quality at slow feed rate suffers and could cause nozzle jam.
Another thing i noted that for PLA black as night, multiplier should be set at 0.9 if springs are tight. It also produces better prints.
Can there be a mechanism other than springs to save the gear from being worn out? There need to be a detector at the head to prevent overfeeding which causes the filament to jam and gears to take the fall.
In reply to: PolyWood from Polymakr
Removing the gear should be a last resort(extruder cant even feed and living too far from UK to send back extruder). Taking it apart is a pain but after you do, you have one less worry about spoiling the extruder gear again as changing gears after that is simple. The main weakness of the extruder is the gear.
In reply to: PolyWood from Polymakr
@kingmar sorry to hear that, i know the frustration based on my struggles with nylon. Perhaps printing the updated extruder gear that @azk13 developped in another post on the forum could help with flexible filaments, not guarenteed but worth the try, this will require taking apart the extruder so if you are not confortable doing so, i suggest not attempting it. For the wood filament, others seem to have used it without too much trouble, look up other posts on wood filament, perhaps there may be a clue to help in solving your feeding issues. And when you are ready you can fiddle with the items i mentioned earlier and hopefully that helps as well. Stay positive!
Topic: Extruder Gear Army
My backup extruder gears, the front most being the best setting and going to the back the quality of the settings drop.
In reply to: PolyWood from Polymakr
@irawans your prints are so beautiful!! Anyway to adjust feeder’s grip on filament, you need to tighten the screws that has springs on the extruder(need to open the left side of robox). Dont make it too tight or your gear will take the fall. Too loose it will slip.
In reply to: Room sign
@clicky thanks! And I am still on the same gear lol.
In reply to: PolyWood from Polymakr
can anybody post some images of how well polymax, polyplus and polyflex print. Any noticeable issues we should be aware of other than the air print problem @irawans discussed in another post.
@irawans your air-print issue may be due to some components (drive gear) of your extruder being worn out or not tensioned properly, there are other posts which other some remedies to it, when I started using t-glaze I had to reduce the tension on my extruder otherwise I experience similar purges as you showed in your other post, however i cannot recommend which way to tension your extruder for the poly materials as I have not used them yet. I am interested in the polymaker print quality so if you could share some images and issues you have experiences (support removal, dimensional precision, shrinkage, warping etc.), it would be greatly appreciated.
So basically I have observed that the gear nozzle seems to stop flowing plastic at mid print. This causes the gear to turn an unmovable filament which then wears out the gear in the extruder and, will require you to send back your robox for an extruder change, adding to your frustration.
Solution is to set the print temperature higher. How much higher may depends on your climate but at where i am(24 degrees room temp in air conditioner) 185 degrees will jam the nozzle midprint(after 2 hours) for PLA. I found it better when nozzle temperature is increased by 7 degrees or in my case to 192 degrees.
I guess the theory behind it is even with the heated bed, after printing a certain amount of layer, the top most part of the object will just be at ambient temperature making the print bed useless.
So end of the day the nozzle temperature needs to be set at a temperature that assumes the print bed is not in play. In PLA i think its 190 to 200 degrees.
I hope cel can solve this issue that causes the nozzle to jam by increasing the temperature as layers get thicker to compensate for the loss of heat from the heated bed to the part.
In reply to: Extruder gear material (from metal to plastic)
Ahaha such beauty!! Anyway I found one of the reasons why the gear gets worn off.The nozzle always jams midprint because somehow the temperature is not distributed properly throughout the nozzle. This causes the gear to turn a non movable filament(which is due to the jam).
When the filament doesnt move in mid print, i ramp up the temperature to 200 degrees for pla and it flows again. Thank god i saw it before it wears out my current gear.
It happened again. While I was printing, the filament stopped flowing. Then I checked the reel filament, the Robox did pull it. So it did not slip, in addition I did not hear any slipping gear while it still pulling the filament.
I did not stop the printer, after couple of layers filament was flowing again. I have been successfully printed in PolyWood before. But, lately the filament randomly stop flowing.
Any clue ? Software Bug ? Does anyone has same experience before ?
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3sdxcpmfjmsnzlt/IMG_1654.MOV?dl=0
In reply to: Seriously, should I get a Robox?
Well in my opinion(I am from singapore), there are lucky people and unlucky people. I was the unlucky one but it was a blessing in disguise for me.
Long story short
My unit came
I printed once.
It was ghost printing after a while.
The extruder had problems.
I panicked because sending back to UK will be damn long and expensive.
I send a ticket but since it was the holiday season, no replies(still no reply now).
I needed to prototype and was desperate.
I self diagnose the printer by diassembling it(the extruder)
Found the problem.
Needed a replacement part(gear) and asked cel to ship it to me since it is smaller and cheaper.
Still no reply because it was still holiday seaason.
Stressed for 2 days because I need the part.
Was thinking of fabricating it myself.
Ended up manually extruding the filament to print the gear.
Success of designing the gear on the 3rd revision.
Everything works damn well after that and I am a happy man.Not so short story aahahaha.
In summary, you need technical skills to be able to remedy 3D printers when they fail since we live quite far from UK. There will be too much downtime if you dont self remedy. And there are underlying issues with the printer which requires it to be sent back and forth but I think that may not be specific to just this printer.
In hyper summary,
If you dont live close to the 3d printer vendor and have no skills in repairing, don’t buy. If you live far but knows how to self remedy and you really want a 3d printer, you can buy.An alternative is to wait for robox to sort out issues(there are only 2 main, extruder and head) which are not a lot. I think this printer has potential because it is very close to out of the box experience minus the 2 main issues.
In reply to: Extruder gear material (from metal to plastic)
@bespokeproductdesign Thats sad to hear.
Anyway the plastic gear is not any better than metal but it helps to be able to print your own replacement on a part that will wear again and again.
I have printed more than 10 stuffs in 4 days with the printed gear and works amazing. If it lasts very very long i’ll ask cel to take my design and implement it in their new extruders because i think mine is a slightly bigger gear which prevents slippage. I used the axis oil they gave me to lubricate it too. Prints are good and everything works well.
When I get my polymax pla, I will print more gears in it as it is very strong(see link).
