Drumming sound and sticking when raft printing

Support&troubleshooting Zortrax M200
#1

I'm a complete novice and newbie and have a problem with my newly purchased Zortrax M200.

It makes a drumming sound from time to time when printing and, within the first couple of minutes of starting a print, the drumming will get louder and the extruder will briefly stick in one position.  Unfortunately so far I have not managed to get it to print the initial raft without sticking, creating something like a tiny cowpat and then carrying on with all the print misaligned.

After much thought I concluded it must be because I was printing in the garage and the temperature was possibly not a guaranteed constant 15°C or above, so this morning I brought it into the house and let it warm up all day.

This evening I tried again a couple of times in the warm of the house and I am getting the same results. I am auto calibrating each time I print, just in case this might make a difference.

So far my daughter and I have had the Zortrax a week and a half and have had no success printing anything!

Things I have tried in order to fix the problem:

1. Constantly auto calibrating the build platform.

2. Very gently tightening up the Hotend.

3. Loosening the screws underneath before it prints to lower the build platform.

4. While the extruder was sticking I gently rotated the build platform by hand to release the sticking by lowering the build platform in that area (but the loud drumming continued and the extruder still stuck for a few seconds, which I don't understand?

5. Moving the printer into a warm environment and trying the above over again.

Please help!  Your advice will be much appreciated.

Thank you ever so much.

Jonnie

#2

The drumming is probably the stepper skipping. That would mean you have to much friction in the rods due to binding. Move the head around by hand with the printer being off. Is the resistance the same in all directions?

If not, try this:

Move the head into one corner. Then loosen and re-tighten the hex screws that hold the bearing blocks for the rods in this particular corner where you have parked the head.

Do that on all 4 corners. One after the other. This might release the the tension that causes the binding.

Also check that the thinner rods that hold the head are perfectly perpendicular. If they’re not then you have to loosen and retighten the pulleys to allow the system to square itself up.

Video of drumming sound would be good to confirm my theory.

#3

Hi Andre,

Thanks for replying and for your help. I'll have a look at doing this tomorrow and will take a bit of video too. I'll let you know how I get on.

Kind regards,

Jonnie