I was recently gifted a kit built Ender 3. I’m not sure how many owners its had over the years or what was done to it, but it’s been heavily modified and upgraded by people with varying levels of experience.
I’m planning to clean it up and play it forward to a friend, but it’s got a few problems that I don’t know how to fix, as I’ve got a newer model that ran right out of the box and is still in its vanilla state, so I’ve never acquired the skills to troubleshoot the hardware.
The axis all move normally when manually controlled so that aspect of the printer seems OK. The problem comes when I try to home or level it.
The X and Y have no problems, but when I do anything automated involving the Z axis it fails
The printer seems to be having trouble homing on the Z-Axis, and the auto bed leveling stops part way through, so after hitting the bed.
When I try to home the Z it goes al the way down until the nozzle is pressed into the bed. It looks like it’s trying to push down further, the motor makes a tick-tick-tick noise and the gantry arm looks like it’s straining to push the novel into the bed.
The probe doesn’t trigger the gantry to stop, and I’m pretty certain that the Z-stop either isn’t connected or isn’t functioning as pressing it manually doens’t do anything.
When i try to do an auto bed level, the probe goes down once and retracts without touching the bed, and then the gantry goes down and pushes the nozzle into the bed as if the probe isn’t triggering it to stop.
This happens 100% of the time with absolute consistency. Same routine, same place.
See videos.
this is how I received the machine, I didn’t make any of the changes or modifications myself.
I have zero awareness of marlin firmware, or how to retrieve any relevant information out of it, so I’d very much appreciate instructions on how to find anything that people need to know.
So far, the printer hasn’t been connected to a computer. I’m running it entirely off of the control panel as my computer is in another room and the printer isn’t networked.