I’m working on a life-sized project with about 80 parts, splitting the workload between my P1S and X1C. My P1S has been running for 600 hours this past month and performed flawlessly until a few days ago.
Lately, it’s been dragging more filament debris (“poop”) onto the bed, creating messy print towers with pools of filament stuck to them. Worse, the printer consistently stops around 6 hours into a 13-hour print.
A few nights ago, I found the print about 6 inches away from the extruder, which was moving in mid-air as if it were still printing. No filament was coming out. I stopped the print, unloaded and reloaded the filament, and manually extruded it, which worked fine. But restarting the print led to the same mid-air printing issue, and this happened three times, each time roughly about 4-6 hours into the print.
The crazy part, too, is that the object looks perfectly fine up until it literally stops extruding.
I’m using Sunlu PETG with the same filament and settings that worked for about 40 of the 80 parts, so I doubt it’s a settings or filament issue. The filament is dried, and I’ve tried a fresh spool from the Sunlu S4 Dryer, but the problem persists.
I read another user resolved similar issues by replacing the TH board after trying several other fixes. I’ve opened a ticket with Bambu, but I’m not expecting a quick response.
Any advice or tips to troubleshoot would be greatly appreciated!
Before looking at the extremes, take a good look at your nozzle. Use a camera to get a good shot from the front and the side.
==> Is it bent? Curling and Poop chute clogs have ruined a few nozzles for me. Easy fix though by replacing the hotend. Re poop chute clogs, is the little metal plate still in the poop chute? If not, poop can get temporarily stuck on the residual adhesive.
If it is straight but still won’t extrude try from the back spool or fully manually. If that works but not from the AMS, check your PTFE’s thoroughly and clean up any wear in the connections by cutting the worn bits cleanly at 90°.
If it also does not extrude from the back or manually, do a number of hex key cold pulls on the nozzle and check your extruder gear for residue. If in doubt, clean out the extruder and check for wear. (Was that a CF filament in the filament?)
Only then do you need to worry about things like a defective thermistor (can be checked while doing a cold pull), damaged pins or even a TH board replacement.
Thanks a lot for the feedback here. The nozzle isn’t bent, fortunately, and it extrudes perfectly fine from the AMS if I manually press the arrow down on the menu for the extruder. It always works perfectly fine here when I do it, and even re-prints for another several hours just fine until it eventually stops extruding in mid-air again.
Since this is my first time dealing with this, I do have a quick question. If there were any problems regarding clogging, residue, etc., wouldn’t the print fail to extrude again if I restarted the print? The only reason I don’t think it’s related to clogging is because I can extrude it manually just fine and I can restart the print and it prints fine for several hours again. I would imagine that a clog would be a mostly permanent thing until manually resolved, meaning it wouldn’t print just fine again if I restarted the print.
I could be wrong here, but just the first thing that comes to mind around the idea of it being clogged.
Thanks again for the input here! Curious if you have any thoughts around the above.
Mhm, sounds more like hear creep. If you are OK for the first 3 hours, you could lower the nozzle temp a little after that time. And/or check the chamber temp and open the top to let some heat escape. Did you observe a gradual rise in chamber temp?
Gotcha. Thanks for this input! Printing out a nozzle wipe mod (to fix the annoying poop dragging to the bed problem) and going to start up the print again with your suggestion. Crossing my fingers!
Not quite sure about the chamber temperature when it happened, unfortunately. I was just so confused on why it happened that I didn’t really dig into it yet. The next two times, I just tried random clog-checking stuff, but I’m definitely going to try to observe more next time if it happens.
Just an update here. I switched to another slot with another roll (same filament, color, etc.) and this time it printed the whole thing just fine. Going to try introducing the problematic slot’s filament into the equation again to see if I can narrow this down between the filament and the feeder (since that’s the only difference between the working vs non-working cases).
I’m not sure if the feeder just stopped feeding at some point, but I’d imagine this is a handled exception/condition to alert the user if it notices no more feeding (I could be wrong here).
