Filament stuck but printer keeps running without extruding

Hi all,

I’m having this issue consistently with my A1 mini, and just yesterday happened, coincidentally, for the first time with my X1C. The spool is stuck and not rolling, yet the toolhead keeps moving, running gcode, without extruding anything, as if the print was going fine.

In some occasions, it was actual broken filament where there’s a small piece stuck in the hotend that needs to be plucked out, in others, the filament was still there in one piece, just the spool was stuck.

In either case, shouldn’t the printer pause the print and wait for me to fix the issue, instead of keeping going?

I have taken apart the extruder like in this video Bambu A1 / A1 Mini Extruder Teardown/Maintenance (youtube.com), there was nothing wrong except some grinded filament on the gear, cleaned, but the issue persists.

Appreciate any help

If you have filament stuck in the toolhead it will keep going through the process of printing unfortunatley , as the usual error msg is a filament run out error which will pause the print/er until rectified by the user .

If you have the camera disabled for security reasons, a lot of the failure detection no longer works. I notice that sometimes when I get a clog (which I suspect you have too, or a spool knot) it homes back to the poop bucket, purges [ or attempts to], then resumes, but it just kind of does that and retries dozens of time all on its own without ever throwing an error.

My educated guess is that it’s a combination of both spool knot and the nozzle not functioning correctly. Spool knot is easy enough to check, and I confirmed it happened, though it’s not necessarily a knot, but rather just some sticky layers in the spool.

As the spool fails to get pulled and rotate, the filament stays at the same place, which is detected by the sensor. It doesn’t go out because something’s wrong with the nozzle which can only extrude if filament is being actively pushed to the tip, which is not the case as the spool is stuck.

I made this conjecture because 4 out of 5 times I took the hotend out to inspect, the filament was in one piece and was still stuck to the top of the hotend.

I have ordered some hotends from Ali. If anyone comes across this in the future lmk, I’ll let you know the result

May not be applicable, however heat creep can occur if you have an enclosure or a low melting point filament with a hot day. The filament softens, and when it runs through the extruder it gets deformed and stuck.

I had this issue happen to me. 5 hrs left on a 17 hr. print. Is there any way to figure out where it left off and resume? Thank you!

Most common recommendation is to measure the completed part’s height, cut it in the slicer and print the top part, then glue together