I have the printer sitting on a mousepad to dampen it,

I have the printer sitting on a mousepad to dampen it, but If you listen closely, you can hear the grinding(?) sound from the x-axis. Any thoughts on what’s causing this? Also, any ideas on why my filament seems to be globby? Extruding PLA @190C
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CquEBpOX-OQ

190 is too much for PLA. The strategy should be to start at 180 and go down until you see that it does not extrude properly any more.

Then PLA printing usualy requires a fan, as it takes time to cool and when layers are small the “second” later is “poured” when the “first” one is still “not-solid”.

I cannot hear anything abnormal

i use pla at 195

@Alberto_Valero_Gomez , you need to have the sound way up, you should be able to hear each step that the x-axis motor is doing. It just seem abnormally loud to me, especially when all I hear from the other motors is that nice electronic whine. Another problem I’ve been running into is the extruded filament sticking to itself and/or the nozzle. I’m not sure if that’s due to poor adhesion to the print bed, but that’s the only thing I can think of.

@Nils_Hitze , I’m going to play around some more with the temperature settings. It seemed to me that it extruded better at 190 than at 180. This was at a layer size of 0.4mm; if I did any smaller then I ran into issues. Once the printer gets going, it works quite nicely. In the video I was making a wallplate cover (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:47956), and once the first few layers were done, it progressed quite smoothly.

@Alberto_Valero_Gomez printing at the lowest possible temperature will inevitably result in poor layer adhesion.
@John_Schneider I couldn’t make out a grinding noise either. If it persists, try greasing your x-rods and checking the belt tension.

@Thomas_Sanladerer , I’ll do another video either tonight or tomorrow that should better demonstrate what I mean.

For what it’s worth, the sound is clearest right around the http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CquEBpOX-OQ#t=0m26s mark. Still pretty difficult to make out without good headphones/speakers turned up high.

John, are you sure you have well calibrated your extruder? This: “the extruded filament sticking to itself and/or the nozzle” could be caused by extruding too much plastic. You have to be sure that when you tell the extruder (through Pronterface or other interface) to extrude, let’s say, 3 cm, it really takes 3cm of filament.

No, not sure that it’s properly calibrated. I didn’t have my calipers on hand and just wanted to get up and running, so I used a ruler that only had inches and then converted to cm. Now that I think about it, it’s very likely this is a source of some of my woes.

Quite possible :slight_smile: