e3d V6 Heatbreak broke, and I Helped!

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Harblar
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Joined: Tue Jul 08, 2014 5:17 pm
Location: Aberdeen, SD

e3d V6 Heatbreak broke, and I Helped!

Post by Harblar »

So last night I was happily testing my new Raptor PLA from Maker Geeks and printing away at single wall boxes while trying to nail down the extrusion multiplier. I had it within .05mm of where I wanted it and wait a final tweak in cura 2.5. When I ran the gcode (4-5 minutes or less since the last print) the skirt came out like morse code on the bed. The print itself ended up being nothing but random dots that eventually grew in height till I canceled.

I cleaned the tip and manually ran the extruder, filament came out fine. tried the print again and the same. Long story short, I trouble shot my way through a number of different scenarios until I finally decided it must be a clog or a jam causing this. I ran the nozzle temp up to around 210 in an attempt to try a cold pull. It wouldn't retract so I kept bumping up the temp until it would. By 260 degrees it still wouldn't budge and I was grinding the filament, so I disconnected the bowden from the extruder end, clipped the filament above the grind, and tried pulling by hand. It finally broke free. turns out there was a bit of a puck on the end, but I'm pretty sure that formed as I was trying to remove it since it would still extrude prior to that (just not during a print). I looked down the top of the hotend but couldn't see any filament there, so I took the hotend off and decided to take it apart and look for the problem.

The Nozzle didn't want to screw out of the heat block, the heatbreak wanted to screw out of the heatsink very easily, so that's what I did and here is the first thing I saw:

https://goo.gl/photos/NuaaWpyAKQQi6qYy6

It looks as though my Nozzle either wasn't completely tight or came loose over the last week or so. The red is from the ABS I was printing until yesterday so it had been doing it and building up for awhile.

The heat break was almost entirely clear and there was no indication of any heat creep that I could see.

I was determined to get the nozzle out so I could see the rest and, being a tired idiot, began torquing on it with a wrench and a vise grip. Needless to say the little brass fitting wasn't as strong as the thread coating Raptor PLA and twisted the top clean off. Doh! :roll: (At least I'm pretty impressed with the strength of that particular PLA!)

So anyway, Here I sit with a busted heater block. I did eventually heat up the block with a lighter and the break turned right out no problem. As I mentioned earlier, the only filament I saw was squarely in the meltzone, so that's good, I guess.

The moral of the story, really make sure you've got that nozzle tight against the break, run it up to temp, and then give it a snug just to make sure. That's what I'll do when my replacement parts get here! Since I had to buy some new stuff I went ahead and got the copper alloy block and a couple of the copper alloy nozzles. I like the idea that it's suppose to resist plastic build up/adhesion way better than brass. We'll see how well it works in practice when it gets here next week! Till then! lol
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