(tl;dr: if you have a fan that cools your hot end or heat break, lubricate it. It may solve some problems.)

It’s a good thing I splurged on the dual extruder for my printrbot way back when. Not that I use it very often, but entirely by accident it saved me from going down a diagnostic rabbit hole.

I’ve been printing car bodies for a little mobile-robot workshop at the 11-year-old’s school, and I finished a roll of PET+, so I decided to do the rest of them in PLA. Cued up a roll, did some test extrusions, started the print. Jammed. Cranked up the temp, ran about a foot of filament to clean out any PET+ remnants, started again, jammed again.

For about an hour I went through the same cycle with different rolls of PLA, cold-pull, “cleaning filament” etcetera. When I did a series of text extrusions, things were fine, but when I tried to print, jam. I got ready to disassemble my hot end, but.

Just to procrastinate a little, I decided to deal with the fan on the second hot end, which had been stopping randomly for a few months — it’s always on, because that’s the way the printrbot does the fans on the all-metal hot ends, but I hadn’t actually been printing with it, so I didn’t worry too much. So I read up on fan lubrication, and while I was doing the one, I figured I might as well do the other fan, on the hot end that I do use. It hadn’t been stopping or making noise, but what the heck.

Guess what. I thought the fan on the primary hot end was running fine, but apparently it wasn’t. Because now both fans are running, and I just ran the same hour-long build that was jamming consistently, without a single hitch.

Note to self: consider building a cheapjack tachometer to see when the fan slows down.

Other note to self: consider printing up little caps for the lubricant well around the sleeve bearing, because apparently cheap 30mm fans don’t bother with those.