Evening,
I am continuing to have a lot of problems with “clogs” on the XL. It clogged on the last 3 out of 5 prints for me, with the latest knocking a toolhead off during the process. My prints are simple and I am using plain old PLA and with the default PLA profile from Prusa.
Today I used toolheads 1 and 5, which are supposed to be two of the “good” toolheads, but it looks like both of those are having problems now as well.
I cleaned up the XL as best as I could, including removing toolhead 5 and extracting some filament which had wrapped itself inside the fan on the toolhead. After which I gave it a good vacuum, went through a couple park/pick cycles on toolheads 1 and 5, and cleaned the bed.
It looks good now, but I don’t believe cleaning it actually fixed anything. I am also not convinced the nozzles are “clogging”. For example, I noticed a kink in the bowden tube for extruder 5 when I was loading filament this morning. I don’t know what is causing the problem, but at this point I think we should consider digging deeper.
Well, what is this? I see a big bird’s nest of unattached print. It was flowing from somewhere. Those should be all-in-one nozzles so it can only be flowing out of the nozzle
It’s a fail, sure, but I wouldn’t say “clog”
Nozzle 1 stopped flowing about 20 layers into the print. Nozzle 5 wasn’t needed until about layer 30, so when it started printing with nozzle 5 there was nothing under the nozzle to support the filament and it made a birds nest.
Because we don’t have the ability to monitor prints remotely I was unaware this was happening and it continued to print for a few more hours, wasting filament and my print time, and making a big mess. We are actually lucky in the sense that the machine was smart enough to sense that the tool had not been parked correctly and it should stop. Many other printers are not that smart and would have banged themselves into oblivion until someone stopped it.
The cause of the print fail is that nozzle 1 stopped flowing, why it stopped flowing needs to be explored. FYI, it was nozzle 1 that failed on my previous print the previous day. I have lost 15 hours of my limited print time in the last two days because of these failures.
At this point I am not reserving time on the printer until we figure out what is going on, I am just blowing through my time and the printer is obviously having issues. This is a shame because my project is at a complete standstill due to these issues.