I got my Kywoo Slim printer last week, and it’s done well for its price of £200, although it was slightly bad at detail as it would drag the filament along with it, rather than the filament adhering properly to the build plate.
Today I tried to fix that issue by increasing the nozzle temperature from 200° to 210°, which is in the recommended range for PLA filament (190 to 220). My hotbed temperature has stayed constant at 60°. Quite to my surprise, instead of printing normally or even at all, my nozzle instead dove down straight into my build plate, through the hotbed underneath it, and started melting the plastic and vibrating, drilling through the hotbed.
I stopped it printing immediately and inspected the damage. There was a hemispherical dip in my build plate, with a hole all the way through it in the center. In the hotbed directly underneath it, there was an indentation probably about 1mm deep in the exact size and shape of the nozzle.
Can you help me understand why changing the nozzle temperature would have caused it to do this, or if my printer is safe to use now? Also, can I fix it, and if so how?
Edit: terms
To be clear…I DO think this is a problem, but I do not think it is connected to the other issue.
Your nozzle should never touch the bed.
Look at your limit switches. Did one break or disconnect. Use the slicer to move your nozzle close to the bed. Like really close. Amd then see what the coordinate it THINKS it is at. The distance should match the physical distance you can measure with a ruler or calipers. If the nozzle is like 10 mm above the surface, but the software think it is 30 mm above the surface then clearly you have a zeroing problem (usually a limit switch issue). If you hit Home, the printer is going to continue to drive thag nozzle down until it smashes into your bed again… what prevents that is the limit switch.
There’s a sort of sensor next to the nozzle on the printer head that triggers when it’s pushed into the bed, is that the limit switch you mean? When it triggers is when the printer stops when it’s homing itself.
Maybe.
Printers work in different ways. The convential way is literally a simple switch that’s screwed into the Z axis (most of the time aluminum extrusion) and when the carriage lowers enough it hits it and triggers it.
What you are describing sounds like it might be part of the auto bed leveling function of your printer.
I wonder if your printer is combining the limit switch function with the bed leveling function with one sensor. That would save money in manufacturing. I don’t have a printer with auto bed leveling so I can’t tell you if that is common to merge both functions with one sensor. Maybe someone here has experience with that and can answer your question. Maybe search the printer’s website for information that explains that part.
I guess one way to test it is to see if you can trigger that sensor and see if the printer then thinks it is at a height of 0. I wish I could help more,but I’m not familiar with that specific model of printer.
Ok, thanks for the help you can give, I’ll do some research.
The only thing other than the temperature change I changed between the previous print and the fateful one was I pressed the auto level function on the printer. Then I homed the printer again, and printed.
Okay, so by running the auto-levelling routine, you will have reset the printer’s coordinate system. Sounds like it maybe ended up thinking that the bed was lower than it actually is, and therefore plowed into it. If the bed wasn’t at the absolute limit of the allowed z-axis travel, the limit switch might not have engaged.
On the model of printer I have, plowing the bed is usually a sign that the sensor in the print head has gotten displaced before or during levelling, so check to see if yours looks crooked or pushed back, or if any wires that should be stuck to it have come loose. It might be useful to know what kind of sensor it is—the one in my printer triggers on metals, so it’s possible to test it with a coin and see if the attached LED lights to indicate that it’s working.
I suppose it’s also possible that the autolevel data is somehow not being correctly saved. Your printer may or may not have some method of inspecting the saved data (and it might be anything from a neat GUI to “pass this gcode through a serial console”).
Inspect the gcode of the print you attempted for weird z-offsets if you know how, just in case it was telling the system to start printing at -10Z or something.
Manually leveling the thing might be worth a try if it offers that option.