Extruder calibration woes.

banie01

This is more a tale of certain companies cheaping out on parts than it is a request for help.

I've had a Wanhao D9 400 for 3yrs and it has been very much a love hate relationship. Initially the printer suffered from serious ringing on print over 5cm tall. This was nailed down to the print bedinducing vibration as the printhead rose up the z-axis.

Wanhao addressed that with the MK2 kit and bracing arms on the z-axis. Now that kit also came with the BL-touch for print bed levelling and some other little tweaks.

The thing is, for every single good print I had? I had 3 or 4 failed. Levelling never stuck and had to be relevelled constantly. I abandoned the printer for a while as I had plenty of other things to keep me busy.

I decided to strip and rebuild the printer on Thursday. That went great and after taking a look on the FB group, I found that there was a Waggster FW available that included a long wanted/needed auto-level option.

Load it up and that at least solves the bed levelling issue. So reset the eeprom and went to recalibrate extruder e-steps. Factory default is 94, but last calibration was 98.

Sent the g-code to extrude 100mm and? 1st effort was 64mm, so I took apart the extruder to clean it out. Resent the G-code and this time it extruded 48mm! Ran the extrude a few more times and the variation between each extrusion? Means that it's time to replace the crap Wanhao extruder with a BMG and get the unit running within a decent and repeatable spec.

The printer offers a great build volume but it is a PITA to get running sweet.

banie01

Just on this. I got sick of the variability the stock extruder was giving. I've ditched it for a bondtech and it is a night and day difference.