3D Printing Filament issues

Hello All,

I have been having big issues with the filament of the machine.
Basically what was happening was that the filament was no longer feeding properly.

Causes of this could be one of many, but in my case it was simple but hard to find.
The extruder is built from plastic. This plastic is not the best kind and will warp badly.
Im not sure why, but after about 100 hours of printing the plastic had warped enough to increase the friction against the filament.
This caused the extruder to skip and not feed properly.

Simple fix was to take it all apart and drill our the plastic extruder with a 2.5mm drill.
This fixed the issue.

[img]http://www.combomakers.com/images/drilling.jpg [/img]

Next step was to make sure the cooling properly worked.
Added thermal paste to the filament pipe against the heat sink. Also added thermal paste on the area where the first heat sink meets the second one.
This should help to keep temperatures down and perhaps keep this from happening again.

Thermal paste on the first heat sink and on the filament guide tube.
[img][url=http://www.combomakers.com/images/paste1.jpg]http://www.combomakers.com/images/paste1.jpg[/url] [/img]

Thermal paste on the second heat sink.
[img][url=http://www.combomakers.com/images/paste2.jpg]http://www.combomakers.com/images/paste2.jpg[/url] [/img]

One more thing.
I found out that the thermal barrier ptfe tube is about 0.3 mm too short.
This causes leaking and will make a bad mess if you print enough.
Fixed it by shortening the thermal barrier pipe.
If you plan on doing this, make sure you shorten it at an angle so that it seals properly against the nozzle.

Can you upload pic or video on you tube to show the people new at this what is the problem and how to fix them expain is 1 thing but showing or seeing is other .that would be helpful

I need to rebuild my left extruder also, so ill take some images while updating that one.

That very good thank you

Here is a small guide to how I fixed my filament issues.

First, the easy part.
Drill out the holes in the filament feeder with a 2.5mm drill.
From what I have been able to understand the plastic gets deformed after a while and shrinks the hole increasing the friction and making things stick.

This is the change, smaller drill is 2mm larger is 2.5mm.


[img]http://www.combomakers.com/images/drilling.jpg [/img]

Here is some more images of where I added thermal paste to try and lower the temperature.

Thermal paste on the first heat sink and on the filament guide tube.
[img]http://www.combomakers.com/images/paste1.jpg [/img]

Thermal paste on the second heat sink.
[img]http://www.combomakers.com/images/paste2.jpg [/img]

Can't see the pic file not found

[quote="Aceatz"]Can't see the pic file not found[/quote]

The [/img] tags got in the way, just remove them from the end when copying the URL or directly in address bar in your browser.

Edited the link,  will make update the main post with all the information.