I’ve been using M200’s for more than 5 years now. I have 3x of M200’s at the moment printing mostly 24/7. I’ve had ton of experience of fixing these machines but this time I’m running out of ideas.
We are running Z-Code files that we’ve been using for more than a year now flawlessly but suddenly the oldest of my M200 with 11.5k printing hours started randomly giving me weird quality issues - plastic sagging over even tiny bridges and overhangs. Here are a few pictures with how the parts look like normally and how they look on this machine now (there was no gradual appearance of this issue, I just noticed from one point having these issues and it’s been like that since):
Since there are no other visual issues like under extrusion or brittle parts the only logical thing that seemed to cause this was either:
- Not enough cooling (I had swapped my cooling fan to a Noctua one on this printer without any noticeable effect and it is working just fine so it’s hard to see how this could be a sudden problem)
- Heater/Thermistor has gone mad and are giving some wrong readings and overheating the hotend
So to test my theory I removed the Noctua fan and replaced it with a brand new stock one from Zortrax and guess what - nothing changed.
Next up I swapped out the heater/thermistor pair (to be fair, I don’t remember when I swapped it the last time) with a brand new one. Aaaaand… nothing changed.
I also cleaned up the heat brake fan and channels to make sure it’s not overheating there - no visible changes either. Fans spinning just fine.
Next up is a nozzle change (honestly makes 0 sense but there’s not much left to try to swap out). Will report how this goes.