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That's a good print. Not excellent, but certainly good.

cvoinescu wrote:That's a good print. Not excellent, but certainly good.

The goal is to be excellent. I have seen excellent prints and just need to fiddle with it until I get there.

Did you put the right screws? 3mm instead of 4mm should work...

fma wrote:Did you put the right screws? 3mm instead of 4mm should work...

Are you talking about the tension screws? I used 4mm and they fit just fine. I was just wanting to know how tight to adjust them.

Sorry, I was answering to your initial problem; I didn't see the next pages!!!

fma wrote:Sorry, I was answering to your initial problem; I didn't see the next pages!!!

No worries. Thanks for the response!! There are so many variables to chase down and refine when you first get started that it is overwhelming.

Hi Guys,

Haven't been able to spend much time in the past month on the ord bot due to some family illness. I was able to spend a few hours this past week and I am having some issues calibrating the extruder. My prints were becoming increasingly sparse. I thought the hotend might be clogged and that might have been part of it but not the main issue. I removed and cleaned the nozzle. While it was off I decided to recalibrate the extruder. I have a 47/9 Wade's Reloaded with a standard 1.8 degree motor. I have the micro steps set to 16. My calculated steps per mm come out to around 711. The first time I calibrated it a couple of months ago it came out to be 935. This past week I tried to calibrate it and I went all the way up to 1135 and it still wasn't high enough. I have the tension set high on the idler screws. The hobbled bolt is not chewing on the filament as the hotend has been removed.

I am starting to suspect that the small gear is slipping on the motor shaft. Not sure how to check this to confirm it but I am out of ideas on further calibration. I could understand it the new number was anything close to what the calculated value of 711 steps per mm but 1135 is more than a 50% increase. Something is wrong.

Any ideas on how to check for a slipping gear or what else might be going on?

SOLVED the Extruder calibration issue!


I spent a lot of time this evening trying again to get the extruder calibrated. The problem seemed to be very unpredictable. The extruder would not extrude (hotend removed) the same distance twice. Just for my own curiosity after not being able to make any progress I decided to check out the eeprom function within Repetier using the Repetier-host printer eeprom settings page.

As soon as I enabled the eeprom I noticed that the extruder motor sounded much smoother. I was able to get it nailed on the calibration after just 3 passes and it was dead on each time I tested it after that. I started going through the eeprom settings and noticed that the anti-ooze was turned off (Ops_mode=0) so I turned it back on (Ops_mode=1 (classic) or 2(fast)). As soon as I turned it back on the extruder sounded like it was not running smoothly and the calibration was way off again and not consistent in how much it would extruder. When I turned it back off, the extruder sounded smooth and the calibration was again accurate. Not sure if this is a bug in the firmware or what but I am glad to have that behind me. Now on to trying some printing again:)