Wanhao i3 Duplicator plus new owner please help - video included - not extruding - no clog! grinding noise

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1

Hi all,

I’m in desperate need of some help with my final uni show coming up in a few weeks.

I purchased a Wanhao i3 duplicator plus (also known as the balco touch) off of a guy from Facebook marketplace two weeks ago.

He showed me it working well, he has put a glass bed on it, upgraded the fan position - Got it home and it worked well for me for two prints. Then when I was happy with the printer i let it sit for about 10 days.

Now I can’t get it to work at all. It, is grinding on some extruder movements, i think on retractions which sounds horrible, please see video link. it is also doing some odd twitching.

it appears to be not extruding at all. Then i upped the temperature from 190 to 215 and 230. i am printing in PLA and this was working fine before at 190. going up past 220 sometimes gives me some material coming out of the nozzle.

I have cleaned out the gears, changed the nozzle, the ptfe tubing is perfect, no clogs.

I am really stuck now, i’ve tried printing with retractions off and still no luck, i’ve tried lowering the printing speed too.

Any help would be much appreciated, thank you!

James

2

Hi, can you get material to extrude prior to printing? As it looks like you have the nozzel to close to the bed and thats why you are getting the grinding noise.

3

hi thank you for the reply!
it extrudes a tiny amount when feeding the filament. then when the printer is heating up preparing to print, it expels a bit of filament, not as much as it should. and then the process starts as shown in the video
-i can confirm the nozzle isn’t too close to the bed, i have exhausted the levelling possibilities and it’s not this

4

It sounds like not enough traction from the gear onto the filament. Try to get your material out, cut it where it feels smooth and feed it again.

Another problem could be that the temp isn’t high enough.

If the temp is high enough try to manual feed some filament through your nozzle while it’s at 210 degrees celcius