I made a leap in 2018. I crowdfunded a 3d printer, M3D’s Crane. I chipped in for the Crane Quad and it took a long time to be delivered. More then a year I waited, pondering in the mean time if I shouldn’t buy a simple printer to play with. I decided, with some encouragement from my wife, to wait patiently until it arrived.
I have to admit, I did not expect the machine to be so tough to run. I did a lot of reading while waiting, but I did not came prepared enough. I read it before and I have to agree now: this is not a beginners printer. However, I’m learning a LOT about the internal workings of a 3D printer now. I’m learning a lot on how to set it up, how not to set things up and learning how little I really know.
After a lot of problems with the flimsy direct drive motors, I jumped Quaden-wagon. This is a mod on the machine that replaces the direct drive setup into a 4x bowden extruder. It worked great, until I switched some fillaments.
So I’ve been having a lot of problems with clogs ever since. This machine is almost famous for it these days, but this week I finally found out the reason for my faults. The nozzle has four inputs, if I extrude one fillament, it will go into the mixing chamber, to the outside AND to the other three inputs… So the trick was to carefully feed all four before extruding anything through the nozzle. It does make a lot of sense in hindsight, but it took me far to long to figure this out…
So now I finally have a stable print again, running with the Quaden mod and decided to go big. I’m trying to build a LED bridge, so I have a better working place for painting and modeling and such. Also, it looks awesome and that does count for something. 🙂
First I ran into an error “Short to ground reported by driver(s) 3”. My printer was still running, but port 0 (= drive 3) was standing still: No extrusion whatsoever. I terminated the print, rebooted the machine and checked again. Motor was running fine now, no problems extruding, no errors. So I restarted the print again.
After another 2 hours, same issue. I went on to my fav. group on facebook “M3D Quad Owners“. This group is filled with creative minds, hacking and building on top of the device to make it shine. Countless years of experience (400+ members) stacked into a small place. I got the suggestion to try and switch from StealthChop to SpreadCycle and that seemed to do the trick. My print was running fine for another 8 hours until I saw this.
So that was a waste of about 50 meters of fillament. But, on the bright side, the printer seems to be working stable again, and up for bigger prints.
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