So from time to time we come across difficulties pertaining to the functionality of our Anet A8 printer. Well, last night was one of those times.
i just got done with a successful 3 hour print of a cell phone case with some TPU. The next day I go to print with some plain ol’ PLA and I hear clicking from the extruder. I immediately knew there was an extrusion problem. I had the problem before and it was the hotend getting jammed up because the nozzle was too close to the bed causing the filament to squish itself up inside the throat. I also ruled out temperature of the heated bed and the filament because I use the profile I made up in Simplify3D.
So I re-leveled the bed before calibrating my auto level sensor and retried the 20mm cube print. First layer was fine and then on the second layer it jammed up again. I pull the bowden tube out and clear out the squished filament and I noticed the tube was very warm almost hot. I also noticed the filament was half melted as i pulled it out of the tube. I thought oh this is a different issue here.
I knew from research that the tube passes through the heat, the heat sink has a fan to keep it cool to keep the filament below the melting point before it is pushed through to melt at the nozzle.
My stock fan was slowly dying and was not able to do that. So I replaced the fan and immediately went back to printing.