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My Ender 3 started to skip steps on the extruder, therefore no more filament comes through the nozzle anymore.

When I push the filament myself through the extruder, it works somewhat flawlessly. It's almost like the stepper motor doesn't have enough strength to push the filament through the tube.

I already tried to:

  • Replace the extruder with an all-metal one
  • Replace the PTFE tube with a better one from Capricorn with the appropriate fittings
  • Ramp up the temperature from 190 °C to 220 °C

I'm printing with PLA, E-steps are around 95 and the speed is set to 50 mm/s.

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  • $\begingroup$ Ender 3's extruder is notoriously underpowered. The consensus these days seems to be that you need a geared extruder to get enough torque to reliably extrude at decent speeds or with difficult materials like PETG. But if you're hitting the problem with PLA at low speeds something is most likely wrong. $\endgroup$
    – R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE
    Commented Sep 3, 2021 at 20:26

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So, this might not help everyone, but I fixed the problem by increasing the tension on the spring in the extruder and by changing out the stepper motor (I used the one that came with the new all-metal extruder) to a new more powerful one.

So, all in all, my problem was a combination of those two things.

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  • $\begingroup$ When a different stepper is installed you need to make sure that it is properly setup, i.e. the reference voltage, or current, needs to be manually set or specified in the firmware depending on the type of drivers you use. $\endgroup$
    – 0scar ♦
    Commented Sep 5, 2021 at 17:19

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