Not a request for help—yet, at least. Just showing off the gore from getting the printer working again.

It was living on the floor of the basement where my son dumped it after moving down there. I finally picked it to and gave it a home on my own work bench.

Initially, it was printing fine, but after the first dozen mm of PLA, it clogged up. Son didn’t have the tool, so after trying to improvise, I ended up removing the nozzle. That was all good, except there was old pla in the nozzle. Second plan of attack ended up with me heating to 250 and plunging the chamber with fresh PLA until it started sputtering. I then returned the Bowden tube and dialed down the heat to 200. It seemed to hold, so I reassembled the hot end.

Next, I attempted to print again, but I had no tool heat. Power cycle and reconnecting to octoprint resolved that. Then I reversed and fed the filament until it ran properly.

As you can see here, the next problem was patchy, uneven extrusion. I found that the extrusion would continue with a little bit of pressure against the filament to the drive gear. That’s where you see the dark patch on the right where it started working again on the second layer.

You can see the big gap in the middle, and it was as it was passing left over that spot I noticed that the drive bearing wasn’t moving. so I first loosened the screw that held it in. I paused the print and removed the bearing, lubricating it with some PBlaster. Since that didn’t resolve it, I found the tension bolt was loose and put it all the way to max.

Observing the printer further, I noticed that the drive gear was jumping back when it did not appear to need to be retracting. It was here that I realized it was a pressure/flow issue, so I paused the printer again and increased the temp to 205. Once it stabilized, it started printing smoothly again.

Below is the continued/rescued print. It’s a rough draft, so the mess won’t bother me. I feel safe enough now to walk away again and let it do its thing.