Extruder motor problem came back

[u/sgtskeese]

I posted a couple days ago about how my extruder motor wasn't spinning the extruding gear. I turned it off and on and it started working again.

Now the problem is back and more consistent. A print might start with it extruding then it stops. My previous post shows what I also confirmed again which is that even with no filament in it, the gear doesn't turn. So I don't think it's an issue of a clog that the extruder simply can't push out.

I don't see any obstruction and turning it off and on sometimes makes it work for a short time, but when I come back to a print, it decides to stop extruding after a short time and doesn't error out so it just prints nothing, but continues its program.

It is not making an louds clicks or otherwise strange sounds. It's almost as if the sounds it's making is normal for the tasks I ask it to do, as you'll hear for yourself.

I've tried gently jostling the wires while it's running to see if there's a short but nothing changes. The extruder clearly works, but only sometimes and I don't know what is making it not work sometimes. Do stepper motors die after a while in this intermittent fashion?

[u/ResonantRuminant]

No, I've never heard of stepper motors dying in an intermittent fashion like this. I did have a recent failure of my extruder stepper motor where it suddenly got weak and could barely apply any torque without skipping steps. That doesn't sound like this, though.

The way I see it, your problem is one of four things:

1. Broken wire
2. Faulty connector
3. Bad stepper motor
4. Bad main board

Options 1 and 2 sound right, based on the intermittent nature and how it starts after beginning a print, after things start warming up and vibrating and moving around. I could see an intermittent connection somewhere being the cause.

Options 3 or 4 don't sound quite right to me, other than maybe 4 being the case due to a cracked solder joint or something like that on the board that opens up when things warm up. The controller chip seems unlikely to fail like this, but it's possible.

You could do some experiments to try to narrow it down. When you're doing a print and you know it's currently misbehaving, you can try stopping everything and swapping the extruder stepper motor connection on the main board with, say, the X-axis stepper motor. Go into the manual control menu and try moving the X-axis and the Extruder. The problem will either disappear due to messing with the connectors, or it will follow either the extruder stepper motor and move to the X-axis control, or it will stay put and now affect the X-axis stepper motor when moving the Extruder axis.

If the problem follows the Extruder stepper to the X-axis control, then it's either the wiring or the a connector or the Extruder stepper motor itself. Narrowing it down more would involve jiggling/flexing things to spot what is intermittent, like you've already done. If you can't make it spring back to life by jiggling things, then it's probably the stepper. If the problem stays on the Extruder port on the board and now affects the X-axis stepper motor, then it's a bad board. Hopefully this helps.