Fridays are a short day for me at the Libray @ the Dock’s Makerspace, so you can imagine my surprise when I went to use the Up 2 plus know as Yori (I named all the printers in the Library after characters in the film TRON) and found her clicking away instead of printing smoothly. The clicking sound was the stepper motor getting jammed and in this case, it was due to filament getting caught in the feeder tube.
After some brain strain and a little creative thinking, I realised what the problem was. Different plastics have different temperatures where the plastic becomes soft enough to be malleable and after some ABS was burnt in the hot end, I started pulling the machine apart to attempt to clear the extruder.
Fortunately, I was able to get the hot end and tube hot enough to clear the jam and get it to extrude filament. I honestly thought we would need to get a new part for the machine, but due to the way that UP designed the hot end, I was able to remove the heat-sink and allow the feeder tube to come to temperature, removing the burnt ABS, and cleaning the jam.
Total time? 2&1/2 hours of burning my fingers and learning how a UP printer goes together.
And now I get to go home