Hey everyone, I have a very frustrating problem that’s now happened to me twice in the last 2 weeks. Completely separate printers, nozzles and filament. Both X1C’s however.
First I had a .4 nozzle I was printing PETG with, all of the sudden it stopped extruding halfway through the print and was “printing” but not laying down filament any longer. I tried manually extruding and it seemed like there was a clog as when the yellow extrusion gear got to a certain point it just started grinding. I tried doing a cold pull, that appeared to get some filament out but when putting new filament in and trying to extrude same issue, not a single microgram of material was coming out of the nozzle. I’ve tried literally every method that I know, cold pull/hot pull/poking it with a needle/heating/cooling not a single thing has made any difference. The tip isn’t damaged as it was printing just fine for halfway through a large print before just randomly stopping I guess.
Now the exact same thing has happened on a different X1C I own, except now it’s a .2 nozzle and it was printing a mix of basic/matte PLA. Same problem, halfway through a print it just decided to not extrude out of the nozzle anymore, same symptoms and fix methods as before didn’t achieve anything.
I’m completely lost on why this is happening all of the sudden out of nowhere, I’ve had printers running for a thousands of hours and have occasionally gotten clogs but never have I had THIS kind of a clog before, and worse it was on 2 separate printers in the last 2 weeks. If anyone has any advice or help I’d really like to fix it or at least know the cause before just getting frustrated and buying an entire new set of nozzles…
Not sure what you mean by different null but if you meant nozzle then yes I tried that and it printed fine so it’s not the extruder, whatever the issue is it’s the nozzle itself. Tried messing with them again today and zero luck. The tips don’t look damaged there’s still a nice clean hole but it’s clearly clogged.
Only thing I can think of is there some nuclear level solvent I can just soak these stupid things in or something and destroy whatever the ■■■■ the clog is in there? I’m not sure if that’s a good idea either but I’d really like to save these nozzles and not just throw them away…
So there are a couple possibilities for what is going on. If it really is a clog, keep doing cold pulls until the filament shows no sign of any discoloration. I assume you already know that one cold pull may not be enough. But I thought I would mention this anyway.
When you were doing the cold pull, was much filament coming out? If not, then can you run a needle through the end when its hot? After running the needle, I’d do another cold pull. They seem to work wonders.
I know it is said a lot here, but drying your filament makes it easier to feed through the nozzle, you may have already done this, but just checking.
Finally, how many hours do you have on these nozzles? They do wear out. The smaller 0.2 nozzles seem to wear out more quickly for me. If a different nozzle works and these have a few hundred to thousands of hours on them, then it might be time to get a replacement.
Yeah I’ve done maybe 20 odd cold pulls and it hasn’t made any difference. I did notice the first several times there was still old colored filament coming out (there was last red in there and I was cold pulling with white) but after that it wasn’t discolored at all. It was just the pure white coming back out with no specks of anything else or other filament left over.
I’ve tried heating it and poking it with a needle and I can’t get it through the nozzle whatsoever from the outside. When I try poking it through the inside I do feel some resistance but I can’t tell if it’s just my needle being flimsy and bending or if it’s hitting some kind of weird internal geometry in there or what.
I do always dry my filament thoroughly so I don’t think that’s an issue at all.
As for hours on the nozzle… maybe 500? I don’t feel like that’s an insane amount but maybe I’m wrong. That’s for the .4 nozzle, the .2 nozzle that clogged had less than 100 on it I know that much. I’m not super familiar with bambu nozzles or printers but I really don’t feel like that should be a lot of hours on a nozzle especially considering the .4 was a hardened nozzle and they’ve both been printing nothing but PLA and VERY occasionally PETG. One of the replacement .4 nozzles I used to replace it to check if it would work with another nozzle has had like 2000 hours of print time on it and that thing’s still running just fine, and that one’s been beat to heel with all kinds of exotic filaments too.