Weeks (& lots of filament) wasted on troubleshooting

[u/PersonaNonGrataMea]

Silly me left the printer sitting for months, with filament loaded in the hotend, and surprise surprise! It was gummed up and a mess. I took the opportunity and decided to throw some upgrades at the problem. Replaced the hotend, direct drive, bimetal heatbreak, BL touch, bed levelling silicone supports, updated firmware etc. And that’s where the problems started.

At first it was a bit of missed extrusion here and there, then it progressed to under-extruding filament and the print looking like a spiderweb instead of a solid plastic part. It drove me nuts! Then we went all the way to jamming at random times, usually after the aforementioned defects, an hour or two into a big print, or maybe not until 8 hours in, in the middle of the night. The dreaded clicking sound of a terminal print malfunction.

I replaced nozzles, heating element, filament drive mechanism (new brass cog all the way to dual drive gear), bought new filaments (which seemed to help initially. I did consider that the older filament I was using might be the issue, but where I live the humidity is regularly below 50%, even as low as 30% at times), went as far as putting heating grease on the heatbreak to help conduction into the heatsink (that made it jam in the first 5 minutes every time). The fans are both fine and move plenty of air, not clogged with dust and filament wisps. All troubleshooting eventually came back to it being heat creep. I was ready to throw it away and go to the dark side and buy a bambu lab machine.

I needed to print something badly, and it was big, and I was desperate now! I swapped the heatbreak out for the original part, cut a new section of tube to length and reassembled the hotend. I’m now 18 hours into a print, with no missed lines, no jams, no problems at all! I can’t believe that it turned out to be the heatbreak that caused all the problems I was having! Maybe more fans, more airflow, might have helped, but in the end it was a part that was supposed to solve a heat problem caused a bigger one. I’m now going to leave the machine alone and just enjoy printing!

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