3D Printing Forum

I've been reading lots of posts and haven't seem to find a solution so some of the problems I'm having.

I've got the HIC Desktop printer DIY kit.

Everything was going great for the fist few weeks. PLA prints only. Print quality was great. Printing only gcode from SD card. Learning lots and tweaking some things through Cura. Very cool. Reading lots as well here on this forum. Lots of learning.

About a week ago i started getting BAD printing errors.

1. At random times during the print the printer head will print a random line that shouldn't even be there. Sometimes a long horizontal line outside of the perimeter box (outline) extending all the way to the end stops, then back. Sometimes a random diagonal line on the print itself at a random angle or runs over an area where no material should be.

2. Extruder has sufficient flow only SOME times during print (at all temps between 190-210 for PLA). When manually extruding by .1mm there's some clunking noise and stepper motor doesn't feed well and flow is a trickle. Manually extruding at 1mm flow is much better but sometimes clunking noise and flow stops to almost nothing. (I've changed nozzles twice)

3. Random z axis shifts. During a few prints, the Z axis has shifted up by 1cm or more and started printing the next layer.

Not sure if there is some catastrophic firmware issue and need to reset/upload new firmware (i've read all posts in that vein).

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Jon

Any video of this happening? How far into the print does it occur? Does it happen consistently at a specific point in a print? Or random?

That is strange. I assume you are using a HIC i3 type printer? With no pictures or video of what is happening the problem cannot be determined here. Random lines sounds like a slicer issue? Doubt it's the firmware as I/we are having no issues on our end, but maybe you could try another firmware version?

I had similar issues with the head jetting off one direction on my HICTOP 3DP-18... and sometimes just completely stopping for no apparent reason. I switched over from printing from the SD to printing from an OctoPi and haven't had those problems since. That was on factory firmware, I have since upgraded the firmware but haven't tried printing from the SD to see if it fixed the issue yet.

re: your filament issue, the only filament issue I had was too much resistance from the filament monitor + putting the spool directly on the m8 rod... I removed the monitor ( by sticking a dummy piece in until I can actually fix it ), and added a filament spool ( with a barring ) to reduce the resistance. Amusingly I found that I had too little resistance then, which meant when the extruder pulled in filament, the spool would roll too much and get tangled, lol.. but cranking the m8 nuts on the spool/barring gave it just enough that I haven't had problems anymore.

re: your z axis shift issue... maybe it's related to the x or y axis "lines" thing? maybe it's just shooting straight up or something because of a firmware glitch? I'm a total noob, I've only had my printer for a few weeks.

I know this is an old post, I had problems similar to this, as well as prints stopping before they were done and the printer saying it was 100%. I tracked the problem down to the fact that I wasn't clicking "safe to remove" before removing the SD card out of the card reader on my PC and it was corrupting the g code files.