Lgx lite defective or flaw?
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Sorry to bother you all about this but the bondtech support portal isnt working. I just got my printer back together after a rebuild of the x/y parts and my lgx lite is failing to extrude any filament that is not consistently around 1.74mm.
I have a new roll of hatchbox petg that measures 1.71 and even with that, I only get about half way through a small print without it failing to extrude. I do have the lever in the middle position for solid filaments. I have a new rapido hf hotend as well. I have only been able to get a successful print using a roll of repko Pla that measures 1.74mm. Any filament below 1.71 won't extrude...I have an old roll of pla + that's 1.68mm(shrinkage?) it won't work at all.Do I have a defective lgx or is this a design flaw in the preset tension mechanic of the extruder? Has anyone else had this issue? Any and all recommendations are welcome. I'm really stumped here as I've built my printhead around this extruder on a vzbot print carriage, so my options are really limited.
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Sounds like a question best answered by Bondtech.
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I was able to contact Bondtech and they confirmed the lgx lite is designed for properly
sized filament. My issue is I received a lot of filament when I bought my printer and it's at least two years old now. Even though most of it is still sealed, there are some rolls that have been opened that are getting brittle and have decreased some in diameter.I was told for undersized filament, I could use the TPU setting on the extruder. This has worked ok so far without the motor getting hot or any other issues. The lgx lite is pretty well built. I thought at first my issue was cold extrusion. I installed a rapido hotend and even though I pid tuned it, I'm still not sure if I have the right settings in config.g for that hotend. My old hotend was a v6,
Overall, I'm happy with the lgx lite. My only wishlist item would be a "middle of the road" setting between the solid and tpu settings for when you don't have optimal or consistent sized filament.
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@idodgeads
Did you consider getting rid of the ( brittle or color-faded ) old filament? What could you make with it anyway?- Building deko parts?
- Building structural parts?
I'd answer No to both...
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@o_lampe
I will have to toss out some of it, a few rolls are so brittle it reminds
me of uncooked spegetti. I have about 25 rolls of all colors and types, it'd be a shame to not salvage some of it. I did discover that I had not updated the B and C values for the new hotend. I did that and retuned. The hotend temp seems stable now so that may be part of it.
The rest of my problems are no doubt the inconsitant diameter of the filament. With the extruder in the solid position, sometimes it will pull the filament in with force and sometimes just lightly pinching it with fingers will stop it. Its totally random. Here's a pic of what it did yesterday, it starts the layer out fine then makes this gnarly line then the MFM pauses the print.
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@idodgeads said in Lgx lite defective or flaw?:
The rest of my problems are no doubt the inconsitant diameter of the filament.
That's the mother of all problems! An inconsistent diameter does not result from the filament laying around for a while, that's how you bought it. The brittleness of some rolls is mostly a result of how you store them, daylight being the worst enemy.
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@infiniteloop
So lesser quality filament equates to poor consistancy not age. I honestly don't know how this filament was stored before i bought it. I didn't know anything about 3d printing at the time I purchased all of this. I thought it would be a fun challenge to complete something someone else gave up on.I may try another extruder like the vz hextrudort. It will mount the same and I have all the BMG parts already. I will lose the mount for the MFM and accelerometer unless I could modify the motor plate and have someone machine it(no cnc here) I thought I had this project done but some of yesterdays prints had layer shifts at only 100mms. My xy assembly weighs only 798g and I'm using 1684mac .9 steppers. Maybe go back to 1.8 motors?
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@idodgeads Oh, that's quite a lot of different topics. I just dropped some notes about filaments …
. Before you trash the extruder, feed the Bondtech with known-good filament. Never take on multiple challenges at once, target one problem until you can rule it out. To reduce complexity, don't stress the limits of your machine: At the beginning, print at lower speeds. 30-50 mm/s should be no problem for your steppers. That's good enough to test the extruder. -
@infiniteloop
That's good advice, I'll get some new PLA and try it. So far, the correct settings for the hotend have improved things greatly with the new PETG I have and the old PLA is working now too as long as the lgx is set to TPU mode. I was never expecting to get
vzbot or hevort speeds out of this printer. I was just wanting something that doesn't take 3 hours to do a benchy like my old setup did. -
@idodgeads said in Lgx lite defective or flaw?:
I was just wanting something that doesn't take 3 hours to do a benchy
Sorry - the advice to drive tests at lower speeds was not intended to steal your time
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@infiniteloop
No problem, I understood what you meant. Can't start out at wide open settings, gotta build up to them. Unfortunately, something has happened to either my sd card or my duet wifi board. I posted the symptoms, maybe someone will know what happened.
