With the price of 3d printer dropping I figured it was time to buy one. I got the mini select because it was cheap and had good reviews. After updating the firmware and leveling the bed I started my first print which came with the printer. I figured it would be best optimised for this. It started out great but later I started to hear grinding and skipping notices. When the print finished the top half had missing layers and bad quality. Any suggestions on how to fix this?
Hello ChillFam, Sooooooo, hopefully it’s not a reason that requires you to take your extruder assembly apart. Hopefully it’s just that you’re running your filament too cold for the speed that you chose. What filament, temperature, and speed are you running at? If it’s not that, it could be that your assembly is not grabbing the filament strong enough, or a gear is misaligned within the assembly. If it’s something like that, you’ll have to turn to a different user who is more of an expert on that.
Thanks for replying. I was running pla at 190° and the default speed of 1 on the printer.
Would you perhaps know what that speed of 1 correlates to? As in something in the mm/sec or mm/min range? I ask because though PLA can very print at 190C, if you’re going too fast, your printer won’t be able to push the filament through fast enough, and it will click and skip. I’m assuming the default speed on the printer is within a normal range, so I would say you should first try bumping your temperature up. Try 200C, and then 210C, to see if the problem lessens or disappears completely. The higher the temperature, the faster you can go.
Also, if the problem still persists after that, you may also have a small clog somewhere in your extruder. Not that it’s always recommended, but I’ve turned my temperature up to 230C and extruded, and this has helped as well. But again, this isn’t a really good solution.
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As it turns out there was a clog. I just pushed a pin into the hot end and manually pushed out the jam. Seems to be working fine now. Thank you.
