Sometimes when you go get your part you're confronted with one of these crazy bird nests, this print did not work out but all is not lost. You can learn something from a failed print like this either something about how you physically printed the object that fails didn't have enough glue something like that or there was an assumption about how to print this geometry that failed. In this case, it was actually the latter and by taking a look at this instead of just throwing it away before studying it. I realized that there is a very easy step that I can do in the slicing software and in the plating of the object so that this will work out fine. In this lecture we are going to talk about the basics of troubleshooting and maintenance to help you figure out how to solve and prevent any problems that might come up from 3D printing. An approach troubleshooting, clearly identifying the problem. The approach to troubleshooting I will share with you is not highly technical and can be applied to most desktop 3D printers by helping you to pinpoint the precise problem you are facing. In my experience armed with better information you'll have better luck addressing the problem by yourself or seeking further help with support. We won't descend all the way down to exact steps to follow to fix each and every issue so far no comprehensive resource on the subject exists. And I feel that making an attempt to hover down in the trenches troubleshooting advice for every desktop 3D printer ever created is well beyond the scope of any single lecture or roomful of lectures. I'd like to take a moment to remind you of the best practices resources we have covered already, the daily 3D printing checklist and best practices table. The easiest way to troubleshoot a problem is to identify a possible issue before it happens odds are most of the machine issues you are likely to face are addressed on the checklist. And any chance to remind yourself of these elements while faced with the urgency to run a part can save you hours and days of frustration. The core tool I use to structure my troubleshooting approach is a reinterpretation of the classic five W's of newspaper journalism, who, what, when, where and why. For the journalists watching, I apologize that I'm deliberately butchering the original definitions of these terms per classical rhetoric. I'm using them simply because I find them easy to remember maybe you'll agree, in summary here's the list. Who, who is the person or people involved with the issue at hand most of the time this will include you. What, what precisely is happening, not my printer is broken, it won't work that answer doesn't actually contain any actionable information. More like the printer follows the print instructions, but no material comes out of the nozzle. When, here's where the everyday 3D printing checklist can really help you step through the six stages, set up, plan, job, fabricate, review and finish. And use the best practices table to help you quickly identify when in the typical sequence of designing and producing a print your issue began. Where, trace back to where in your hardware or software pipeline the issue arose. If you do a good job with the what answer it won't take much effort to add additional specificity to the where in the machine your problem can be found. But thanks to your mastery of the systems and components from the previous module, you have more tools to bring to the table to trace back to which elements of the printer are involved. And finally why, why is a tricky one because it can feel a bit like the version of what that already has all the issues sorted out. But rather than expecting yourself to know why you'll actually use a series of wise whys as a technique to work back from what You observed to what the underlying causes might be drawing on all four of the other answers to help you. Okay, I will walk you through each of the five stages on their own to provide additional detail and then we will apply the entire troubleshooting sequence to a few common troubleshooting requests. Troubleshooting 1, who, the first troubleshooting stage, who, I'm actually referring to you the individual who is hypothetically experiencing an issue and looking to solve it. Who are you? What role did you play in the process, anyone else involved? What is your level of 3D printing background and experience? How about the specific machine, material and printing technique? How about your level of experience with this specific machine material and printing technique. It is worth considering, especially given how print clusters, workshops and services are configured these days, that there may be more than one person involved in printing not just the design of the part. And there is a crucial bit of information about how the design was exported and how the job file was configured but didn't make it across from one colleague to another, such as what material and nozzle are required. Then no single person has enough information to solve the problem without some detective work. Sorting that out fast will help you know, where to look information that you would need to have to get help anyway. Note that I both mentioned 3D printing background experience and with this specific machine material and printing technique. The you that you define for this, is who actually changes all the time with every part you print as you gain more experience and experiment with more techniques. I start the sequence here because answering who is actually really important to everything that follows. I assure you that drilling down to a clear idea of, the who, on the other end of the line is always the first step taken by any decent technical support professional. And it is valuable to answer this question for yourself even if you don't seek technical support. Too many times intelligent highly trained engineers, educators and designers who happen to be unfamiliar with a particular equipment or process giving them trouble conceal their newbie status for themselves and anyone they approached asking for help. And this often leads to awkwardness confusion and hurt pride when all that anyone really is after is getting that machine back up on its feet and printing excellent parts. If you find your thoughts following this trajectory, I don't know why this isn't working, this should be easy for me, I am smarter than this. Then I suggest that you stop what you are doing and remind yourself that it is the 3D printer itself, that is an idiot absolute and utter moron, trust me. Your desktop 3D printer will eagerly and dauntlessly execute any properly formulated job file that you feed to it, even if the instructions contain absolute madness. And unless the printer has a filament run out detector, up until recently these have been really rare, now I think they'll be very common. The machine will continue haplessly printing for days without processing any material through the extruder. If the unit lacks a closed-loop motion control system and most of them do that machine will have a theory about where it thinks. It's mechanical parts are positioned based on that start dot g code end stop registration, even if it slips out of lock and spends hours slamming the extruder against the side of the machine. It is your mandate to bring rationality and clear purpose to your 3D printer. And the first heavy task of this fabricators burden is to take another deep breath and repeat to yourself another mantra. This idiot machine is probably only doing what the instructions told it to do. If I'm not getting what I want out of it, it's up to me to identify how the machine is confused and give it better instructions. Over time as you level up as an operator don't forget to draw on your past printing experiences to help streamline, how you address a present difficulty. Was there anything about the plan the setup or the job that has changed from last time? Are you making an assumption about an equivalence for printing material or geometry that might be at the root of what is happening? Troubleshooting number 2, what, the second question to answer is what, what is happening? What about it is an issue precisely? Has this happened before? Has something changed since you last printed? If you were to explain it to someone with no experience with 3D printing, what would you say? As I mentioned in the overview, this is a chance to get beyond, my printer is broken, it won't work, no, and through to something that puts you and anyone helping you in the right bucket for what to address. The answer to the generic, it's broke won't actually contain as I said any actionable information. What you need is something more like, the printer follows the print instructions, but no material comes out of the nozzle. Many novices become agitated and frustrated that they don't know the name for what is happening. They expect that if they say just the right thing, then open sesame, the incantation of a single word or phrase will immediately summon up the repair steps in a web search or technical support exchange. But leave categorizing the types of errors and repairs to the manufacturers and technical support managers. You don't need them, what you need is a plain spoken description of the problem that includes everything important in play. Part of the confusion I think is that those seeking help want to leap past the whole process of troubleshooting to correctly name the central cause but consider the consequence of guessing and getting this wrong. If you need a reminder to counter the need to be clever, I'd suggest this line of thinking as with the medical diagnosis, you don't want to be wrong and you want to sort out the least invasive solution possible to alleviate the problem. I find that it helps to write a simple sentence starting with, I, that includes what I did, what my intention was and what happened. Returning to the yelp of rage and frustration, it is broken It doesn't work a better way to share something specific with yourself the Internet a technical support agent etc., would be, I prepared a model in Cura for the Ultimaker 3 for printing in PLA. I load it onto the machine and started the but no material comes out not for the initial purge nor from the printing of the part. There are a few pieces of jargon in there but most of those vaguely familiar with 3D printing could recognize this and you can always substitute more plain-spoken terms for those phrases. And one of the reasons to think this through and or write this down is that the next set of questions which might include a solution can immediately be sorted out by looking at what is not in the statement. Was PLA loaded on the machine? Is there enough PLA on the spool? Is the right nozzle core installed? Is it possible to use the interface to heat up and extrude material? And staring at the sentence I find myself wondering, did I confirm that I sized this for the right machine? Some G-code generated for another machine might actually run on this machine, but a reversed separate polarity would cause the extrusion instructions to slowly back out the filament instead of feeding it forward. Over time you'll nail this stage, but getting anything down at this stage that describes what is happening is a success. You have three more stages to go and each of them are tools to help you revise and clarify this what statement. Troubleshooting 3, when, as I mentioned before we will use the part fabrication stages from the best practices resources to help us with the when. For example, the setup, the provisioning and installation of the base equipment material software etc. These stages weren't necessarily accomplished with the aim to the specifics for accomplishing this current job. And that is how issues with the setup are often pinpointed for many custom projects. For example, the mechanical functional prototype part needs to be completed using ABS filament because the client wants a post processing stage vapor smoothing. It keeps peeling up from the plate and cracking mid print. It turns out that while the right material was obtained and the base printer equipment itself is capable of printing ABS heated bed, for example, it was setup and tuned for PLA not ABS. Without the right adhesion strategy a temperature bump for the heated bed to keep the mass of the part warm, so it doesn't warp mid print and draft shields to prevent the HVAC from hitting the part the part never had a shot. Another when to consider, the review. Parts failing in this stage generally require more attention with the slicer, the export and the design software and the finish. Frequently problems caught at the finished stage tend to be lessons gained in retrospect that will be more useful within the plan stage next time. But there are a few exceptions largely focused on low bearing parts that aren't up to snuff despite part analysis in the design program and parts that proved fragile. Troubleshooting 4, where, would you believe this step in troubleshooting solves more thorny issues for me than any other a lot of its value is connected with its partial redundant nature. Haven't I already sorted out what that problem is in step two with what? Well guess what take another second to consider your machine and the system and the components associated with that description and trace your issue back to the earliest element that could have led to the issue. Last Week while heating up and Ultimaker 3 to remove the cores and fetch cleaning rods to repair what looked to be a cloud extruder. I ran through these stages and remind myself to trace back the filament issue from the hot end to the Bowden to the filament feed and then flipping the machine around to check the filament drive. I saw immediately that the only issue was a not in the material on the spool. I was able to put away my tools, no core cleaning, tool head repair, bowden replacement or filament drive gear to service the earliest problem area in the trace was the only one I need to dress. If you need additional encouragement at when I was mentioning thinking of this like a medical procedure, you want to avoid surgery if your problem can be solved with a simple ointment. Troubleshooting 5, why why why, this is an old technical support trick. Keep working back from what you observe why by why until you uncover an issue in the chain of dependencies. For example, an Ultimaker 3 behaves strangely by failing to cross the entire width of the build volume squishing a lot of mold, right along the center line what's going on here? This is very mysterious. If you state the problem as it isn't printing the whole model you can begin to enlarge on this why by why. By the way, the way that the why tool works is not just when you solve it and you identify the why, it's when you figure out what kinds of questions you need to solve in order to answer the why. So don't worry if this example is something very unfamiliar to you. Why isn't it printing the other half of the model, the machine thinks that the entire volume has another shape? Why does it think the build volume has a different shape? Well, it's hitting the end-stops, my first instinct was that the end-stops were being hit incorrectly or one was loose but it's hitting them correctly the beginning of the print. So it's not a loose end-stop something in the calibration of the machine seems wrong. Why is calibration wrong? Wait a minute, the step to establish the switching bay was not completed correctly the machine thinks the switching bay is on the wrong side of the machine. So whenever it looks to do that action, it's slamming to the other side of the machine. Even if you didn't know that final step, getting to that question about calibration establishing the wrong build volume shape would have been all you needed to ask a technical support team member or an online community member to learn of this incorrectly set stage of calibration. if you contact technical support, they'll probably walk you through something like this why over why over the course of a few exchanges. But guess what you are smart and have a lot of the resources you already need for this technique. You can interview yourself and show up to the support ticket with that entire chain of thinking already started leaning on them for what you are not expected to know. Best practices bed adhesion, so many of the best practices for troubleshooting are all machine and material specific but this one can be generally applied. One of the largest challenges for desktop FF printers is achieving successful bed adhesion, a pretty broad range of strategies tends to work fine but when adhesion fails you lose the part and you can damage the machine. So what I recommend for you are the, 4 C's of conquering adhesion, calibrate clean, cover and cling this is a sequence of steps that you can follow to improve adhesion. First one calibration, first step is critical for most machines rerun bed calibration scripts to make sure that the nozzle is a uniform distance from the plate. While this isn't something that you have to do all the time many of the times when bed adhesion is really bad, you'll notice that the bed is slightly off and running the calibration script will improve it. You can also take this opportunity to slightly crush the distance between the plate and the nozzle. In cases like this I shift from a calibration card feeler gauge, which is around I think around 0.22 millimeters thick to a sheet of normal printer paper, which is closer to one tenth of a millimeter thick. Clean, clean your plate and reapply the bed adhesion solution of choice. This works great for reapplying glue but it also might be all you need to clean hand oils off the plate for blue painters tape or bear glass. Cover, there maybe drafts in the room you aren't noticing that are causing the heated bed to cycle more than usual or for the part to cool on evenly across the surface. Simply throwing up some sort of baffled to prevent drafts and making darn sure that there isn't any overhead HVAC hitting your machine can do wonders for keeping the print on the plate. And then the last one cling, there are other more aggressive forms of bed adhesion aids that you can try from technical glues designed for part adhesion to polyester printing films to third-party surfaces such as BuildTak. Each route is designed tactically to improve adhesion and may save your part. Those are some techniques to help you with the framework to tackle troubleshooting challenges including a best practice for bed adhesion. Facing any tricky issues you need help with? Share them in the discussions for this course and in addition to helping you locate an answer we can help you sort out the route you can use in the future to more quickly identify the issue for yourself.
