DO THIS Before Troubleshooting 3d Printer Hardware

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In today's video we take a look at some troubleshooting I had to do recently while printing out a batch of parts on my Prusa Mini. I spent quite a bit of time going over things and even swapped out parts to discover the issue was completely unrelated.

Assembly and first print of the new Prusa Mini we ordered on Black Friday:

Check out Chuck's video on the Prusa Mini:

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Lets Get Social!

Music provided by Argofox:
NEREUS - Lotus

[gibbnal]

“In that moment, I felt a little bit defeated” marks the halfway point in many a printer upgrade/tinkering session. Good content!

[danielhastings]

I had a print that seemed to be having bed adhesion problems. I tried a brim and glue, but the problem persisted. Then I went back and reviewed the slicing and noticed that a large part of the model that I assumed to be flush with the bed was elevated by a very small amount. Reorienting the part before slicing fixed the problem.

[PWNHUB]

I had a similar problem but I had thought to check the model/g-code after the second identical mess up.

[IamNinetyFour]

For the last WEEK I've been dealing with a really "undiagnosible" issue which turned out to be a z roller getting caught on a modded part I added to it. Stepping aside to clear my head really made all the difference. Plus I have a great set of friends that help me think through problems. Even though most of them know nothing about 3D printing, let alone troubleshooting them, they were a massive help as well!

[eideticex]

Just had a similar occurance from SuperSlicer, which is also a Slic3r derivative. In my case it was a spot on the support's first layer where the extruder would skip a couple mm. Exact same spot every single attempt until I got lucky with it not snagging the nozzle. No other problems in the entire print but it was perplexing. I too went through rebuilding my hot end with fresh capricorn tubing, even printed one of Chep's cut guides to re-recut it after the first cut lego speared due to a slight gap. Still same spot after that. Now I'm probably going to open that file up in another slicer to really look at it and see if it's the exact same issue but more localized than a whole layer. It's been bothering me since that it happened, sign it'll happen again and possibly much worse.

The term lego spear is what I call it when the bowden tube insert doesn't touch the nozzle completely. If you do a cold pull it snaps at that gap leaving what looks like a lego spear tip from an old lego set. Was at least cool to see they come out so easy, took good oil bath to get the nozzle so stick free.

[AnIdiotwithaSubaru]

I love the bondtech dual gear extruder for my mini! It extrudes a little better and it improved my reliability! The worst thing i ever did to my mini was put a SE Mosquito on it...

[SkateSoup]

I had been making batches of something I'd designed that had a flat area with a raised logo for a couple months when I upgraded to Cura 4.11 in the hopes the monotonic top layer feature would make the finished surface cleaner. I started noticing scarring on the top layer just under the logo and couldn't figure out what was going on. Getting frantic because I was working on a modification for a customized one for a customer on a deadline, I modified the surface of the original, set z hop over printed areas, deleted the logo, put the logo on a raised solid, same issue. It was also doing it on areas raised off that surface, so deleting the logo wasn't a total fix. I watched the print happening and saw the print head going to random points around the border of where the logo would be on the layer before it did the logo. It wasn't until I went back into Cura, went to the layer, and then wiped through the print head travel for the layer that I saw it was leaving tiny gaps in some of the lines and going back to "fill" them with a dot after most of the layer was printed. I went digging for the earlier version installer and found the Arachne engine beta build and tried it out. Sliced the file and no gaps in the layer and no extra travel over the finished surface. It even had the monotonic feature, so best of both worlds. Something about those versions just didn't like the file for whatever reason. I now keep both cura current and the arachne engine beta installed, mostly using the latter. The next time there's a major feature release for regular I may throw the part into the new version to see if the gap thing is still happening.

[yoda]

I have came across this issue a few times, first time did same as in video, went threw all the possible physical issues, went to 4 prints then took a step back and asked myself, what is common denominator. It was the gcode from Cura, resliced it, checked it and it was then good. Printed item and all was good, second time I caught it right off due to going threw this already, I now go threw and check my gcode before I send print to printer. 3rd and 4th time, caught it before it went to the printer.

[Sam-chjh]

Once I missed to change the nozzle size in slicer after changing the nozzle of different diameter . The output was fully under extruded. I did not even realise why it happened.
Once there was a bug in cura of particular version, which sligtly shifted the print in X axis which made hole not aligned fully. It took sufficient time to understand that it is not issue with printer.

[HiroEX]

I ran into a similar issue using octopi that set me back a over a hundred dollars and tens of hours in diagnosing. I kept running into strange blobbing issues with my prints, thinking it was a hot-end issue or filament issue. After rebuilding my hot-end multiple times I finally tracked it down to an issue with octopi failing to send gcodes fast enough that would my prints would pause occasionally and I would get little blobs on my prints. After replacing my raspberry pi everything was smooth sailing from there.

[Scynide]

I had a similar experience with Cura yesterday. The preview showed layer 306 out of 634 being skipped. Upon further investigation it was shown to be printing layer 306 down through the print onto the build plate. That would have caused something catastrophic. I have no idea why Cura did that. I went ahead and looked at the GCode in Notepad++ and all the Z commands were actually how they were supposed to be. After that I had the confidence to print it and it turned out just fine. Very strange though.

[PandaPeej]

5 or 6 years ago, around the time I commented that your folgertech i3 wiring was giving me anxiety, I had a completely mind boggling failure on every print I was doing at the time. It looked as if the z axis wasn't lifting and was just smashing out plastic, but everything was nearly the right height when done, so then I'm checking for over extrusion, but 10 sanity checks in, the math keeps being the same... I forgot I'd been experimenting with printing 0.8mm extrusion width from a 0.4mm nozzle in vase mode the week prior. It was my own slicer settings the entire time.

[pnwRC.]

XYZ, I HATED their slicer as well as their printer!

My first 3D printer was the XYZ pro all 3 in one machine. I NEVER used the laser function on it. The scan tool was virtually useless for copying things. After about a year of owning it, I gave the printer to my niece who wanted to get into 3D printing, & got the CR6SE.

After a lengthy time of trial & error, we FINALLY got the CR6SE printing well.

[giaxxone]

Since I went all Prusa I don’t check the slice on MY models as closely as I used to, but always(almost) check it on other peoples models, because when I don’t is when a print tends to fail. There are a lot of nice looking, but very broken “free” models out there… that usually have some version of “I made this in tinkercad” in the description;)

[lxjmwoh]

I had a similar issue to yours back when I used Cura when Adaptive layers first came out back in like 2019. It would under extrude at the same height every time and make a line through the prints or just clog the nozzle to the point it stopped extruding and air printing. Now I use Prusaslicer which has been working really well till just recently. At the end of some prints from prusaslicer, it was moving the nozzle down and melting a hole into the top of the print and then getting stuck or popping the print off the bed. I dont know what changed because I never changed anything in my end gcode and best i can track down is that It started after an update i did to prusaslicer a couple weeks ago. Oh, I almost forgot, I was also having a layer shift at the same height on one of the prints I did, so I did a test using cura on same file which printed just fine. Maybe something weird happened in Prusa's recent update that caused some issues?

[vedranabdihodzic]

My experience with Mini plus was not stellar.
I had a new machine delivered with shorter ptf tube and I lost hours with support till we got it and only to replace it from spare parts that are delivered with the machine. Why they are letting faulty part to be delivered that you need to replace from spare kit is question that only Prusa can answer.
Other issue (and my biggest one) is that this printer is almost impossible to square.
The few dollars/euros saved for not including a couple of metal brackets leave this printer almost impossible to square at Z.
I wanted to split one larger box like object, and I could not get edges to align to be of any use.
I know there are instructions about what to check regarding squareness, but it's never going to work if you need mechanically accurate prints (I tried it).
This printer could have been sooo much better if they have not tried to cheap out on couple mechanical brackets that could have made it square.
For stuff that are printed as single part it's good enough, but if you need precision, in my experience it is not the right choice.
There is only so much hardware imperfections that you can fix with the software, and this printer reached that limit.
(this is only my opionion)

[johnpekkala]

Checking the toolpath throughly is always important before starting any CNC machine to avoid mishaps. One note: You can't check g code files with G2 G3 (Arc welder processed and similar) as the slicer itself do not understand these commands and will then just show a huge mess. Here u need to be sure everything is 100% correct before exporting to g code as you can't post check it later.

[jeremyowens]

Happened to me before although I didnt go as indepth with troubleshooting hardware as you before I had the thought to check the layers in the slicer. Definitely good think to know for the future though.

[pieyed]

Great video. Just out of curiosity, did you try re-slicing the file in Cura and get the same results? What about re-slicing it with a different layer height? I go back and forth with Cura and Prusaslicer (once in a while IdeaMaker too). Just trying to figure out why Cura missed that entire layer. If you re-sliced that one part in Cure with all the settings the same does the lost layer stay lost? There's some things you can test out in your "spare" time.

[eleanorhathaway]

always check the basics first. its often the simple things that fix issues. like turning it off and on again, its amazing how many issues that can resolve.