In my last blog post, I wrote about getting a new 3D Printer, the CR-10 S5. As of this moment, I am awaiting the arrival of the Pei sheet coming in the mail. So I thought I’d take this time to work on my smaller printer (the Ender 3), which I had upgraded to a DDX (direct drive extruder.) Since I installed it, I hadn’t actually started a print and wanted to see how well it worked. It didn’t work at all. It was not extruding enough filament. At first, I thought it must be the nozzle, probably clogged. So I swapped out the nozzle and tried another print. Still, it wasn’t extruding enough filament on the layers. Then I thought maybe it was clogged, but just higher up in another part of the hotend, so I got a couple of super-thin needles that fit into the nozzle and forced out a bunch of filament. Since so much extra filament came out, I thought for sure that was the issue.
After reassembling the DDX mechanism, I tried another print, but still, it continued to print in an almost dotted fashion. So I went to the Reddit forum: R/3DPrinting and posted about my printer and my issues. also, I tagged this photo with the post:
(click here to view the post I made) and after about ten minutes of my post being up, I got a reply:
The helpful user recommended that I change my E steps to 415, which I had not done. E Steps, to put it simply, are the amount of movements the motor makes to move the filament into the extruder. Different motors produced by various manufacturers need to be tuned to the right amount of E steps. For example, my issue was that my printer was under extruding. Which meant that the motor was not pushing the right amount of filament into the nozzle. The ender 3 had the wrong amount of e steps set to extrude it. So every time I set to extrude 100 mm of filament, it extruded 33 mm of filament, which is way off (this article explains it way better than I could, I recommend reading it for more info). So I set the E steps on the screen to 415 as he suggested, and I started another print. It worked flawlessly, and I successfully got a finished 3d benchy.
Overall the reason I took so long to figure out the issue was that I didn’t do my research and look up documentation on how to set this up. The prints need to be tweaked a little more to look better, but im still satisfied with the results.
As I try to figure out how to work my new machines and fix issues, I often post Instagram stories on my Instagram page.