Upgrade issues

[SurprisedOutlet]

I've decided to finally 'upgrade' my simple metal and am having issues. The first one is the gear head extruder. This was a DISASTER. Impossible to load filament without removing the arm and jamming, skipping and filament flakes everywhere. I returned it for a refund. I think I may have had a defective unit as the hole in the base of the extruder had no relief, just a sharp edge. The filament would get caught on the sharp edge of the aluminum and scrape and jam. I noticed the same part in the youtube video had the hole widened where the extruder exits the gears with nice rounded edges which mine did not have. Oh well. The next problem I'm having is with the new 8mm 4 start Z-axis 'upgrade'. My print quality suffered. Lots of Z banding. Apparently since the thread pitch is coarser, the Z resolution suffered making my prints worse. I've spent a lot of money at printrbot lately only to make my machine worse. I guess you can tell I'm NOT very happy.

[Mooselake]

Do you have pictures of the Z banding? You can upload and attach them (might need to use the advanced editor) as a new user. Your use of offsite links is prohibited, but not uploads, as a new user. It's a spam thing, long discussions elsewhere. I did an upgrade to T8-8 on my own over a year ago and it was a significant improvement.

I have the beta (i.e. you print everything but the gears and bearings) geared extruder, and it's been great. Mine is the fixed spacing unadjustable version, beta 2 iirc. The only problem I had was filaflex wrapping around the gears and I never got around to troubleshooting it - Probably trying to print to fast.

PB's QC is erratic...

Kirk

[SurprisedOutlet]

I fixed the Z banding with some lithium grease on the leadscrew.

[Mooselake]

Grease will attract debris, so be sure to keep the screw clean.

FWIW, I use dry Teflon bicycle lube on my bots. It's a (I believe) wax dissolved in an evaporating solvent with some Teflon thrown in for marketing magic. Works well

Kirk