It’s seriously satisfying to see your printer’s quality degrade slowly over time…then solve the problem. Old hobbed bolt on the left, new hobbed bolt on the right.
Wow, that’s good to know cause I would’ve been chasing temp and other extrusion related factors.
So how did the bold degrade? Clogged? Or eroded in some way?
it visually looked okay, but I had to apply more and more tension to keep it from slipping against the filament. the harder I clamped down on it, the more likely it was to deform the filament and cause feeding issues.
At first I just thought the bolt had loaded up and cleaned it out, but it wasn’t til I compared a new hobbed bolt (with nice, sharp ridges) and the old one (which has had a year of use, easy) that it became apparent that the old one was used up.
whered you buy the new one?
nevermind, saw your other post
I bought the first one on ebay for $6 or so. Be warned, your printed gear and Bolt need to be both metric or sae or you’ll have a devil of a time tuning retract.
Noted 
Funny how such big issues can be solved by something so simple as a Hobbed bolt. Nice post Mike.
Plus experience. I think it’s the polar opposite of Makerbot’s ‘the MagicExtruder doesn’t work? Send it back, we’ll ship you a new one’
While it’s easy to dismiss the tools and knowledge I have at hand. The new hobbed bolt used stuff I already had (drillpress/mill, vice, skate bearings, tap) and $.35 worth of raw material.
In the end anyone can go buy a makerbot but the people that are going to really move this technology on is the people like yourself that are the DIY’ers.
I’m just ecstatic that I can do this stuff…face it, I can’t fab a GPU, or make a cellphone I’d want to own, but I can build a printer and expect good results.