Hey !prusa, maybe you can help me. I have a self-assembled Mk3s+ that I put together about a year ago, but never really used because of the following problem.

If I print on draft quality, it makes it through most prints. I’ve printed a dozen cubes, several brackets, and some other odds and ends.

If I try to print on higher detail settings, however, it behaves very strangely. Most often it’ll just hang, and keep oozing out more plastic. Once in a while, the steppers will keep turning and ram the bed or print head against the ends of their tracks.

I’ve tried updating and downgrading the firmware, different SD cards, etc. to no avail. Support hasn’t been much help either.

Any ideas?

  • @gifflen@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1•7 months ago

    Do you happen to have a video example? It sounds like there might be a few different issues going on at once.

    Does it seem to hit the printbed in the same area? It could be that the bed itself isn’t fully level. I’ve seen some prusas have the frame itself warped. It might be worth looking into the nylock mod. That combined with the octoprint plugin for prusas leveling should help getting your bed perfectly flat and rule out any issues there.

    You mentioned updating firmware and sd cards but what is the slicer you are using? I doubt that would cause any of the issues you are seeing but worth checking off the box.

    The oozing could be due to the hot end being set too high for your filament or potentially it may be too saturated and needing to be dried. How old is the filament you are printing with/how are you storing it? What material/temps are you running?

    There could be something up with your stepper motors and/or wiring. If you move the bed/extruder around through the settings menu can you replicate any of the odd behavior?

    Another thing to check is if your z axis is fully level? There are some small tools for getting a consistent height on both lead screws. I’m curious if one of the steppers is going bad and leading to things getting misaligned and other knock on effects.

    Thanks for asking for help vs just giving up. When I first got mine I had a hell of a time with clogged ptfe tubes in the hotend/extruder. I had to disassemble my printer like 30 or so times to ultimately figure out it was because I had the headers flipped for the heat sink fan and the part fan leading to bad heat creep and maybe a hundred or so hours of pain.

    Edit: on mobile, I’ll try to swing back tomorrow and drop some links for the various mods/tools

    • @cadekatOPEnglish
      1•7 months ago

      I’ll try and get a video tonight.

      It doesn’t ever hit the print area. Sorry I wasn’t clear about that. The X or Y stepper will just keep going, and it’ll push against the limit of that axis.

      I’ve tried prusaslicer 2.6 and 2.5.2.

      The oozing only happens after the print messes up. That stepper just keeps turning with nothing else moving. When it’s running, it does a relatively good job of extruding the correct amount of filament. I’ve only unboxed one spool, but I don’t store it very well 🤣 So far I’ve only tried PLA on the default temperatures.

      I can move the bed and print head through the full range of motion without problems using the settings menu. It does get a bit noisy on the z-axis, so maybe something is misaligned there. What’s this tool you mentioned?

      Honestly, I had given up, but I saw the newsletter for the next version and it inspired me to try again.

      Thanks so much!