Bad cable can cause issues

[rotormansa]

I've had my I3 Pro B for about 6 weeks now and have printed quite a bit. A couple days ago I spotted some odd issue when printing, there would be voids of now extruded material. I chalked the issue up to too much tension on the filament when pulled from the spool. Then yesterday, twice a very long print (3 hours) locked the printer up before completion. I wasn't sure where to dig to solve the problem, I started with the extruder. I disassembled the extruder cleaning plastic out from the brass drive gear and ensuring enough tension was on the spring to not let the material slip. When reassembling (leaving the hot end on) I noticed that sometimes the struder motor would do small kicks instead of a full kick to the next position. Pressing on the cable connector made these little kicks either happen more often or cleared them up. I took the cable connector off the motor and inspected it. Very cheesy cables! Not soldered but crimped, which is find provided their is wire in the crimp and not just wire insulation! One of the wires on the cable had one thin strand in the crimp. I dissembled the cable connector and soldered the wires on the to the four contacts in the connector. That cured the issue.

update: the extruder cable is working well and have a strain relief in place using a tie wrap to the extruder heatsink. This is a temporary fix until new cables arrive. The other problem a bad cable caused, at least on my printer, was the display from time to time would just have gibberish on it... pressing the encoder wheel cleared the mess and the right stuff appeared on the display. Since fixing the cable to the extruder, this display issue went away. My printer also would from time to time just lock up. Again, since fixing the extruder cable the problem hasn't been seen.

[William]

Thanks for sharing your experience.