ERROR: Filament cutter lever is stuck. No it isn't

New twist on this error message as this just happened to me. I thought I would pass this along for troubleshooting in case it happens to someone else. Searches on this error brought up topics that were not what happened in my case.

Got the error message after a long print with quite a few filament changes. The printer stops and will not proceed. I checked the lever and it moved freely. Very freely. Not stuck at all. I pulled off the front toolhead cover and with a quick glance, it all looked fine. So I replaced the cutter blade thinking it’s probably time anyway and it’s a quick easy maintenance thing to do. The printer still threw the “cutter lever stuck” code.

Cover off again to check all of the plug in’s on the tool head. A wire caught my eye. Not a plugin but a disconnected wire from a soldered spot on the extruder filament sensor. Specifically, the white wire. Follow the ribbon cable from left to right.

What I think happened was the cutter lever, through vibrations & movement, was possibly hitting the sensor area or close to it, eventually causing the white wire to wiggle enough to break loose. Printer has about 4600 hours on it, original extruder. There was a slight bit of “slack” in the ribbon cable allowing it to move left towards the cutter.

Pulled out a spare extruder and installed. Problem gone. I paid special attention on the ribbon cable routing and stuck a small piece of double-faced tape to further secure the ribbon cable to the extruder. Ordered a new extruder filament sensor for 12 bucks, cheap fix if it should go bad again.

Thats funny, I had this happen today out of nowhere on an H2D on a 3 hour print. I went down to the printer and it was printing happy as could be and I waited for a bit then it did a filament load for the right nozzle for a second color near the end of the print and it paused. I didn’t do anything but verify everything was ok and hit resume. There were no filament changes just left had the first color for 80% of the print and right loaded its color when it was time - 20 minutes or so after the filament cutter error.
I had not done any maintenance before or after the error. Once job was done I gave everything a look and decided it was a bug in the new studio since that was all I changed in the last 2 days, it could be something else but since you have an X1C and I have an H2D I’m wondering if you are using the version released yesterday.

Yes, my X1C has the newest update.

Looks like it is missing some of the goop that’s supposed to keep the solder joint from fatiguing over time. All of the other wires have that stuff extending from the PCB partway up the wire, but there isn’t much where the white wire used to be. Could be that after 4600 hours the small motions the wire was allowed to make eventually caused fatigue and failure.

Would be a quick fix if you or someone you know is handy with a soldering iron and a little hot glue. Can’t hurt to have a backup. :slight_smile: