How this causes your extruder to skip, which in turns causes the clicking sound, is by not having enough pressure build up to pass your filament through successfully. You can also run levelling print tests which are quick prints that show any levelling issues so you know if your extrusion is good enough or not. Instead of always manually leveling your bed, you can let your 3D printer do the work for you, by implementing the popular BLTouch Auto Bed Leveling Sensor from Amazon, which saves a bunch of time and frustration in setting up your 3D printer.
It works on any bed material and several users have described a significant increase in overall print quality and reliability. Being able to trust that your 3D printer is level every time gives you a genuine feeling of confidence in your machine, that is worth every penny.
When the clicking happens in layers past the first few extruded layers, it means your extrusion temperature is too low. The reason this works is because in some cases, higher printer speeds works fine going at simple angles like a straight line, but when it comes to sharp turns and different degrees, your printer can have trouble extruding accurately at higher speeds. Getting a higher quality extruder can definitely help out in this regard. Now you can either get the genuine Bontech, or the Bondtech clone, you check the the price difference and decide which to go for.
Many times, your printer will give you this clicking noise when your nozzle is blocked. When your nozzle is blocked up, the extrusion and pressure builds up which sets off your extruder to start slipping.
This can result in the plastic forming a plug, or small blockage on the cold side and can happen at random points throughout the print.
Give your nozzle a good cleaning, maybe even a cold pull if the blockage is bad enough. The solution for the thermal break and bad quality heat sink is to lower your temperature or get a more efficient heat sink. A faulty PTFE tube can easily go unnoticed for a while before you realize it is messing with your prints. Your extruder and gears are constantly working and apply constant pressure to your filament as it gets extruded.
While this is happening, your extruder and gears will be biting down on your filament which, over time, can leave dust and debris within these parts.
Make sure you are not breathing in the dust though. The most effective solution here would be taking it apart and giving it a thorough wipe down to make sure you get the offending dust and debris trapped inside.
The type and quality of your filament could also affect this, so try out a few different filament brands and see which one works best for you. This issue happened to a Prusa MK3S user and it resulted in a clicking as well as the idler gear slipping.
Decrease the temperature 10 degrees more, and as it becomes a little more hardened, yank the filament out. When you replace it, remember to screw it back on tight! If you have a clean nozzle but still no luck, you may have to remove the hot end assembly and take it apart piece by piece to find the source of the blockage.
Open the assembly that contains the cooling fan and hot end, and remove the hotend from the carriage. Take the whole thing apart and clean out each individual component. You may need to use a flame or heat gun to burn out any debris. When you open up the hot end and clean it up, you may notice that the PTFE tube has degraded. In this case, you will have to replace the PTFE tube.
If that still does not solve the problem, chances are your stepper motor does not have enough power, which is preventing it from overcoming the pressure required during extruding. Here, what you can do is open up the control panel and find where the extruder motor connects to the mainboard. Turning the resistor clockwise will increase the voltage flowing to the stepper motor and give it more juice to push filament out.
If there is an issue in your printer firmware, you may need to calibrate your extruder. Calibrating is a process where you manually measure and see that the extruder is indeed extruding as much filament as it should be. To calibrate, remove the PTFE tube from the extruder so that when the printer extruders, filament will go straight up.
A clicking extruder can be incredibly frustrating, and was one of my main pain points when I first started learning how to 3D print. I got the hang of it soon enough and once you have your printer calibrated and printing properly, you should not run into this issue again. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.
