A10m Pausing at Purge tower.

[parker1ray]

I have been fighting this A10M for a month concerning pausing and a giant blob at the purge tower. It happens on all two part models sliced in Cura 4.1. It appears to print one color and move to the far right of the purge tower and pause for around 5 seconds and leave a giant blob which eventually catches on the print nozzle and causes layer shift. I have already created a post processing script to comment out M104 and have my standby temp set to the same temp as the print temp so the nozzle does not have to heat up. Any ideas? I believe I have tried all that I can think of.

[William]

Hi, maybe you need to increase the pumping speed and distance in the settings.
You also need to 1. Check the belt tightness;
                 2. Check whether the bearing and the pulley are issued (lubricating oil can be added);
                 3. Reduce printing speed;
                 4. Adjust the drive board voltage (0.8-1.2V).

[parker1ray]

Done all that Thanks. I did find a post that said to give cura a z speed setting other than zero. That fixed the pausing issue, but it still leaves a big blob to the side of the tower when it purges eventually causing layer shift on the print.

[William]

Hi, maybe you still have to adjust the speed and distance of the pumping back, maybe it is too slow. you can refer to this: https://all3dp.com/2/3d-printing-speed- ... -settings/

[parker1ray]

I have fixed the issue! I have been messing with this since I purchased this printer and want to share some things that I have discovered to maybe spare others from the same pain!!!!!!!!!!!! Most of the problems were in fact Cura related, but some were hardware issues. I have changed a stepper motor on the Y axis because the motor was in fact getting to hot and loosing steps. I have changed two stepper pulleys from the cheap plastic press fit to metal with a set screw. I have increased the voltage on the all three stepper boards as instructed on many posts. They are set to low from the factory and the slightest collision throws off the steps. One thing that I hope Geeetech fixes is the cheap extruders that ship with these units. One had the set screw so loose that it would just spin and not extrude. These extruders are very hard to load and need to be metal with an open top so that you can see the filament to load. I will be upgrading these in the near future. Every axis was way out of adjustment and needed to be loosened up. The y would catch due to being to tight. I think that the extrusion might be slightly bent and I had to loosen it to almost too loose the get it to run smooth. Cura does not have a good profile for these printers. I did get Verts profile and load it. Here are some of the issues that I discovered in Cura. I set the standby and minimum print temps to the same as the print temp so it would not wait to heat up. I set the z speed to 50mm/sc because it is set to 0 by default which in my case caused the printer to pause and leave a giant blob next to the purge tower. This would catch and cause very single print to shift other than gradient prints that don't use a purge tower. I did enable z hop because of massive stringing issues and that helped to also help avoid collisions from blobs on both the print and the tower. If you see the printer head stop on the print and the z stepper thump, increase z speed from 0. I inserted a post processing script to comment out the M104 and M109 commands.I set all of my different print speeds to the same. for example I set print speed, outer wall print speed, bottom print speed and all of the others under speed to the same to try and get some consistant extrusion. I reduced print temp from 210 to 202 and increase retraction to 8mm to get the stringing under control. I printed a test stringing model and it was perfect after that. I do realize that temp is controlled by the color and manufacturer of different filaments, so I am trying to use filaments that I know print about the same. I have not tried to change extruder temps for different extruders because I do not want this thing to start pausing again while it waits to heat up. I also included a start script to run a purge line along the left side to help with the cheap extruder needing to purge before printing. I think these could be good printers with a little attention to QC on the part of Geeetech. I have an anycubic Kossel + an Ender 3 and a Palette+(Please don't waste time and money on this Palette+ Mosaic requires you to roll Cura back to 3.3 because they will not test newer versions of Cura in order to force people to use their rudimentary slicer Canvas. Just my opinion!). Both of my other printer printed time and time again with very few issues. I know that dual color print introduces a whole other level of complexity to the process, hence the reason for getting these dialed in before shipping, and providing exemplary support for software integration. I do not know if I received a bad apple, but I suspect with all of the issues it may not be.

[parker1ray]

Just a pic of the latest print! This was a total mess yesterday. I think I finally whooped its but!

[parker1ray]

One last thing that I forgot to add. The original hot end kept clogging every other print so I drilled the screens. Do this at your own risk. There is a post to show how it is done under Blobbing.

[William]

Thanks for your feedback.

[PrebenGH]

Thank you for your solution to the pausing issue. It has annoyed me ever since I got the A10M. I would never have looked at the z-speed for the solution
Maybe you have a solution for my remaining issue: When printning e.g. the two (three with the black eyes) color OmNom, my prime tower always has both colors in each and every layer, although only one color is printed for the first many layers.
I use Cura 4.1 with a square prime tower of 20mm and a layer filling of 40mm3 for both colors (in the prime tower).

[parker1ray]

I am not really sure just what you are referring to could you post a picture. I believe on the prime tower for each extruder you can specify the extruder #. You might try to see if both extruders use the same #. I remember that my prime tower brim used to be a different color than the prime tower base, but now it is the same color all the way through.