3D Printer Repair

Introduction

The 3D printer at our school is a Stratasys BST 768. It ran into several problems including the inability to find home and the continued loss of extrusion.

Inability to find home

I investigated and found out that this issue had to do with the build table not being level with the guide rails. I originally leveled the build platform to gravity, but I later found out that the guide rails were not level to gravity. Because of this, I releved the table using the guide rails as the reference point, and this fixed the issues that the 3D printer was having.

I determined the original cause of the misalignement was the bearings on the Z axis carriage. They were quite worn down, but I was unable to replace them.

Loss of extrusion

I found out that this issue was because the extrusion wheel was gunked up with little plastic bits. My solution to this was to clean the wheel off with a wire brush while running the wheels. This allowed me to get all sides of the wheel cleared.