Posted: 6/11/2026 7:58:17 PM EDT
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Ill get out of the way and say, Yes, Im running and Ender 3. Its been flawless since 2018 when I bought it. Buy a new printer, blah, blah. Not gonna happen. Gonna run this thing into the ground. Im at my wits end on this one. Itll randomly stop extruding and just chew through the filament in the extruder. Hot end set for 215C and indicating 215C. I have been struggling through this last roll of PLA+, cheapo amazon stuff Ive been using for the past year (this roll is a couple weeks old). Printed for a few days on it without issue then slowly I started getting stopped up every few prints then every other print and Im now struggling to get a single print. The hot end plugs up and creates a coal at the end of the filament when I pull it out. Usually I can just reheat the hot end, print for another few minutes and itll clog again. Ive ripped apart the hot end, checked thermistor, heater, made sure the bowden tube is seated and not just filling the hot end with molten plastic (been there), cleaned the nozzle, dried the filament multiple times for days at a time at 50C. Thoughts? |
Maybe you've reached the ground?  Are your extruder gears tight enough? Possibly too high retraction speed is causing the teeth to skip over the material and create a divot which leads to more grinding. Or too much tension on the spool preventing it from unwinding which leads to the same issue. Just a WAG but I've had similar issues with too-loose gears when moving between rigid and flexible materials. |
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Originally Posted By Blob: Maybe you've reached the ground? Are your extruder gears tight enough? Possibly too high retraction speed is causing the teeth to skip over the material and create a divot which leads to more grinding. Or too much tension on the spool preventing it from unwinding which leads to the same issue. Just a WAG but I've had similar issues with too-loose gears when moving between rigid and flexible materials. Its been a good little cheapo printer! Dont really have room for bigger at the moment. Rest of the table is resin printer stuff. Extruder gears are fine. I have a hell of a time removing the filament from the bowden tube and I cant push the filament through. They leave a nice deep mark in the filament from the teeth. When it stops extruding it quickly grinds and cuts the filament in 2. This printer basically sees nothing but PETG and PLA+. Ive worn though a plastic and metal body extruder body set so far on this machine. Its seen a LOT of filament. Spool is fine. It is wrapped well and easy to pull from. No knots. |
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Originally Posted By Blob: My only other guess is heat creep. I have had heat brake fan issues but it's been running every time it's stopped. The coal of melted plastic is only 0.100" to 0.150" tall. As long as I kickstart the fan at the beginning of the print it stays running. |
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Originally Posted By crazyelece: Have you mic'ed out the filament yet to see if the size consistency is in spec? Disconnect the bowden tube from the nozzle and see how hard it is to push the filament by hand. Have you tried printing hotter? Any calibration attempts or changes? Mic? Na. Haven't broken it the calipaters yet either. It's not hard to push down the Bowden. I bet to do that every time it has an issue. Have not tried hotter nor have there been any calibration changes. Had just gotten done doing a run of AICS sleds before it started this. Almost 2 kilos of AICS sleds. |
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Originally Posted By D_Man: What are your retraction settings? Doing a lot of fast and long retractions can pull molten filament into the cold zone and lead to bad clogs. Same as it has been for at least a year and across multiple spools of this filament. Clog is low, not in the heat break. |
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Are your extruder gears too worn? I had problems with my nozzle clogging on my Aquila X2, turned out that the extruder gears were too worn. The filament had abraded the gears so much that there was a little line cut through the teeth of the gears. Eventually that caused the gears to stop being able to grip the filament and feed it as well, resulting in clogged nozzles, hot ends overflowing with melted filament, etc. Never found anything online about that causing that type of problem, had to figure it out on my own the hard way. Here's a picture of what it looks like, mine were much worse: https://www.reddit.com/r/ender3/comments/s2mx6y/on_a_scale_of_say_110_how_worn_out_is_this/ |
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Originally Posted By pomofo: Are your extruder gears too worn? I had problems with my nozzle clogging on my Aquila X2, turned out that the extruder gears were too worn. The filament had abraded the gears so much that there was a little line cut through the teeth of the gears. Eventually that caused the gears to stop being able to grip the filament and feed it as well, resulting in clogged nozzles, hot ends overflowing with melted filament, etc. Never found anything online about that causing that type of problem, had to figure it out on my own the hard way. Here's a picture of what it looks like, mine were much worse: https://www.reddit.com/r/ender3/comments/s2mx6y/on_a_scale_of_say_110_how_worn_out_is_this/ Extruder gear is hardened and is nice and sharp. I think it's heat creep. As long as filament is going through it's fine. When the print is done it slowly creeps into the heat brake. The heat brake fan is lazy and I'm thinking it doesn't quite move enough air anymore. I need to order a fan anyways. The coal I remove when it clogs is hell to remove but not very big. |
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Originally Posted By nikdfish: You may have covered this already, but the only other thing coming to mind is the possibility that the Bowden tube needs the end trimmed to remove heat damage. Probably not an issue if using an "all metal" hotend. I have addressed that. Wasn't an issue. Let the thing sit for a while, it's printing chicken arms right now. |