I have had my vertex since June of 2015 and use it pretty much all the time. No idea how many spools of filament I’ve gone through, but my printer probably has a lot more build hours than most.
In June I was preheating my printer when the firmware crashed, causing the hot end to overheat and melt the beige plastic part of the hot end. This ruined the brass nozzle as well as the hot end. I also noticed some singeing on the contacts to the print head.
I’m not sure what to do about this. Clearly this wasn’t my fault - the display froze so I wasn’t aware anything was wrong until it started to melt. My printer is out of warrantee but the mainboard isn’t. Would this be caused by the mainboard, and as a result would velleman be happy to test and replace the mainboard as well as the components that it damaged?
Thanks for the quick reply, and thank you for moving the post. I am just asking on here as I’m wondering what might have caused this and if there’s anything I can do to prevent it in the future. I’m a bit worried this’ll happen again as this is the second time my printer has damaged itself. The first time one of the stepper motor cables overheated and burned. Note that all the stepper motor drivers were configured correctly.
Daniel, I have had the same problem as you, no only on my hotend but also in the stepper motors as well.
This happens because the Vertex electrical design is questionable, if not horrible. The wiring is cheap and too weak for the amount of current that flows through it, causing burning. You’ve had a firmware error, but this may happen as well when the printer is printing in regular conditions.
There isn’t much you can do other than to replace the burned parts with better parts. In my view, the only solutions is to replace all the wiring with better quality wiring, but that can be both expensive and time consuming. Also, the Vertex is known for rogue heating of the hotend, ruining it. That’s why I have upgrade to an E3D V6 Hot-end, that won’t melt.
So once again a victim of the poor (looking back you can say foolish) temperature sensor assembly
I agree with the statement about the overstressed wiring, at least gold contacts would improve a little bit.
But for the hotend I still belive in the basic design of the part, but the temperature sensor has to be modified ( you can find my modification here:http://ddd.k8400.hoehnemann.net/Heizblock%20EPCOS.html. So with the updated temperature sensing the printer is running smoothly. If you don’t want to print some silly materials (like PEEK or carbonfill) this modification is capable for all other materials.
A comment on your burnt nozzle: in your picture the temperature sensor is not fixed by drilling the cables as described in the assembly instructions from Vellemann. Due to this poor fixation the bad thermal contact may become worse by a displacement of the temperature sensor. In this configuration the nozzle temperature can exceed any limit, burning the PEEK isolator.
