Any had this problem? I’m having no luck recently, its been a while since I’ve selected rafts in makerware but generally in the past its been fine.

Now when printing a raft my extruder clicks with slight gaps in the raft (only for the first part, printing the lines seem fine) , slowing down manually helps in sailfish although I have the rafts set at 20-40 mm/s so dint think this was too excessive.

Don’t think its a levelling issue although could be wrong (the front of my bed drops slightly and is always not as close to the nozzles as the back)

Its a 0.1mm print, not sure if the raft layers (height/extrusion width settings) could have an effect.

1 Like

When printing a raft the layers are usually thicker then the normal ones, this means, that the extruder has to extrude more material in the same amount of time. Due to the fact, that the material has to be heated it can only be extruded up to a certain volume per second, for more extrusion a higher temperature or longer heating zone are required. While printing the raft the printer tries to extrude more material then possible. This causes a lot of pressure between the extrusion motor and the hotend. If the back pressure overcomes the possible pressure, that the motor can put on the filament, the drive gear grinds through the filament instead of moving it. Alternatively it could jump from one teeth to another, this causes the spring pressured filament to get pushed back a bit and after that it snaps into the teeth again, this snapping causes the sound you noticed. You can increase the pressure, with which the filament gets pressed into the drive gear, to increase the force, that the motor can put on the filament. Also you should try to clean your hotend, a partial clogg can be the reason for the increased backpressure. Lastly you can print slower to reduce the volume per second that gets extruded, less volume per second is easier to extrude and will reduce the backpressure. I hope this helps you. Cheers, Marius Breuer

3 Likes

Thanks for the reply Marius, makes sense. I’ve tried slower and its better. Couldn’t think why this would be happening when its been fine in the past but now thinking about it I may have a partial clog as it was a pain on the nozzle mentioned to change filament last time round so will check this.

I’m using custom profiles as before I was just using the standard pre-sets. I’ve lowered the raft layer heights and this has seemed to help also (.3 to .2mm).

Had another problem of my 1st layer not sticking to the raft, upon checking the settings,one thing jumped out at me that seemed crazy. I copied the high profile in makerware for (0.1mm res prints) and the raft to model spacing was 0.35mm. Lowered it to 0 and its a lot better now.

Check your bed alignment and verify you can extrude with it off the glass… Odds are it is just slightly too close, doesn’t take much.

1 Like

I had that problem, i fixed it by cleaning the hot end and replacing the teflon tube inside.

Check the filiment cycle it as in load the filament. I do this before a print when its been a while since I’ve printed. Also your filiment could of broken off and that’s the clicking sound. Another issue could be that your motors are not aligned up.