Bed Height Malfunction

We have not been having any major problems with the printer until now, the printer did it's usual bed/nozzle warm-up & calibration. The printer was set to go with a new print, about 10 minutes later we heard a very loud grinding noise from the printer room. We we went back in the bed was lodged into the print nozzle, and when you look at the perf board it began to print at the wrong height and dug into the board before it got completely stuck. The perf board is trash and we are hearing a wierd noise from the X-Y axis as it moves, after we cycled the power it seems to be calibrated again. Is this covered by warranty? How can we prevent this again? What would be the cause of the printer loosing its calibration right before it begins the print?

Please see here…

You most likely accidentally and unknowingly damaged the little connector…

http://forum.zortrax.com/index.php?/topic/1403-nozzle-crashes-into-print-bed-during-calibration-start/

This connector position would have never made it through a proper FMEA… lol :wink:

We have not been having any major problems with the printer until now, the printer did it's usual bed/nozzle warm-up & calibration. The printer was set to go with a new print, about 10 minutes later we heard a very loud grinding noise from the printer room. We we went back in the bed was lodged into the print nozzle, and when you look at the perf board it began to print at the wrong height and dug into the board before it got completely stuck. The perf board is trash and we are hearing a wierd noise from the X-Y axis as it moves, after we cycled the power it seems to be calibrated again. Is this covered by warranty? How can we prevent this again? What would be the cause of the printer loosing its calibration right before it begins the print?

The sequence of events is unclear to me. You say "the printer did its usual warm-up and calibration" and then "10 minutes later" [10 minutes into the print??] it started making noises? That would be really odd - like it was well into, or finished with, the raft laying before the problem happened? If there is poor electrical contact between the nozzle and the sensing system (perfboard, connectors, wiring) then the initial height can get set wrong and the nozzle will be too close to the bed, but that happens at the very start of a print and is usually immediately obvious. If it doesn't happen until much later, the only explanations I can think of are the bed wasn't seated so the right side was up at an angle, or the Z axis somehow went crazy and either raised the bed during the print or didn't lower itself with each layer (neither of which I've ever seen or heard of).

I make a habit of watching the height sensing process and at least a good part of the raft laying before leaving a printer unattended.

The way I understood it was that they selected the model on the SD card and then left the room…then the cal failed (after 10min of platform and extruder warm up). That’s the only thing that made sense to me… :smiley:

If that wasn’t the case then we need more details…I agree.