Hello Everyone,
We have a X1C at work with about 1000 printing hours on it that we use for printing ESD safe PLA, (very similar properties to PLA-CF) it has worked great up until a couple days ago when I performed standard cleaning and maintenance, and now the ESD PLA filament will not feed through the hot end without clogging in the nozzle.
For the basic maintenance, I did the following:
Clean Filament out of Hot End Using Metal Rod to Push Filament Through
Clean Outside of Hot End with IPA
Remove and Clean Extruder Gears with IPA
Both when starting a print and manually telling it to extrude with the extruder and hot end empty, I can feed the filament to the extruder gears, and they will pull the filament the rest of the way to the nozzle. Then the filament will come out of the nozzle for a short amount of time, and clog in the nozzle very shortly after with the yellow gear stuttering, it can’t even get through the first layer of a very small print. If I try starting a print with it already clogged, nothing will come out. I can still poke the small needle through the bottom of the nozzle to unclog it, but it will clog again very shortly after.
I have checked our settings and nothing has changed in Bambu Studio, I checked the gears, and it is not skipping and there is not much visible wear, so I don’t believe it is the gears being too worn out.
I have tried doing cold pulls to get the inside of the nozzle and hot end clean, disassembling and reassembling the print head twice now to double check everything is put back correctly and inspect for damage, the hot end gets hot enough to melt the filament, so I am really stuck and trying to get the machine back online.
Any suggestions or help would be appreciated, thank you!
Have you tried with any other filament, such as using basic PLA to see if it performs okay? Do you have a spare complete hotend assembly that you can swap to? Is the hotend cooling fan working? Worth double checking even though it should throw a warning if it’s not working properly. Your ESD PLA might be more hygroscopic than standard PLA and wet filament can cause all kinds of havoc, including clogging nozzles.
We do have regular PLA I can try, and a spare hot end assembly I believe, I just don’t know if its the same .4mm nozzle. The cooling fan is working, and I did try swapping to a new, fresh out of the wrapping roll of the ESD PLA that we received last week, and it was having the same issue, I’ll try the regular PLA and swapping hot ends and see what the results are, thank you for your help!
Do you know what the modifier is they used to make it conductive? Usually it is just graphite but sometimes it is carbon fiber. If you don’t have a complete hot end to swap in (I’m assuming it is just a fiber clog that won’t melt) try doing a cold pull.
Thank you for the suggestions, I’ll have to try doing a really good cold pull on that nozzle. I’m not sure what the modifier is, but I did put on a new .4mm nozzle, and the ESD PLA seems to be extruding consistently without clogging now, I am running a short print to check if it is good now. It might have just been a nasty clog that I caused by pushing the molten filament too high in the hot end, I will update if the print is good and if I can clean the old hot end and nozzle and get it working again.
Update:
Print came out good, guess it was something up with the nozzle/hot end. If I can clean and get the old nozzle/hot end working again before the thread closes I will update again.
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