Hi All,
This will be difficult to pin down, but getting pointed in the right direction would be helpful.
Purchased a FlashForge AD5X ~5 weeks ago. Worked great, one button calibration out of the box, I proceeded to do what everyone does when learning: print a bunch of stuff, mix success and stumble over the usual stuff. Ie: Learned why you clean the bed, learned how supports work, deal with filament breaks etc etc.
About a week ago I had a print fail, it looked like there was a broken filament that wasn’t being pushed. I do a cold pull on the nozzle, and was able to print successfully for a time (although there were some small features on some prints that seemed sloppy compared to previous prints).
After that though ALL my prints started to fail. Even after cleaning the bed, double checking bed/nozzle temp, I’d get bad adhesion. I’d also get the nozzle dragging through layers, as if the Z was off (even after running calibration repeatedly and before each print). There was some popping and oozing, which I put up to not storing my PLA dry (although ambient was only ~40%). However the problem persisted even with a freshly opened vac-sealed (confirmed seal was good) roll of PLA.
I ordered a replacement nozzle that arrives today, but can anyone give me some insight? I only ran ~2kg of PLA through, that seems like really premature wear; I must have done something wrong.
Thanks for anything putting me in the right direction.
I highly doubt your nozzle is worn out unless you’ve been printing with any special tough filament (e.g. carbon fibre core). It’s completely different machine, but I have over 300 hours on mine and I haven’t had to replace the original brass nozzle yet.
Edit: Perhaps try printing a solid section of only the first layer (no need for the whole bed, but make is fairly large). See if the lines mostly all join up, then reprint without changing anything to check if it is consistent.
No special filament, other than <10g TPU. Interesting I’ll try the test. I think I’ll get the dragging though, as I was trying to do some business card type prints that were basically what you’re suggesting and got issues. Sometimes the first layer would be ok, sometimes not. It would wind up dragging it around and as it was warm, it would roll the layer into a “snake”