Levelling sensor issues

Ender-3 V3 Printers Creality Ender-3 V3 (Regular)
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I’ve been battling with a V3 KE I was given and can’t believe how fiddly it has been to try and get a decent print. I can tweak values and get a result, but then the next time there are issues. Today I went to do a print without calibration and the nozzle was grinding on the bed so I stopped it, I then tried repeating but with calibration on, and I got a ‘The levelling sensor may have encountered a hardware failure’. I have switched off and tried again, and also done a factory reset. As well as the above I’ve had ‘Automatic height anomaly’ and ‘The levelling sensor may have an external disturbance’. Typically the errors occur when the probe is in the bottom left hand corner and if you move on the bed checking happens but the results seem to change slightly. When I watch the probe it appears to function - turns blue, the probe drops and then red when it touches. Typically in the left corner it has several attempts - I don’t think it did originally.

Is there anything I can check apart from replacing the probe?

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other thing to check is the strain sensor in the front left corner. A combination of the CRtouch and the strain cell is used to autolevel.

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So I decided to strip it down and when I removed the silicon cap found the whole head embedded in filament. Heated it up and slowly cleaned it all up and found that the nozzle and unscrewed itself by several turns. Retightened / assembled it and that corrected the sensor issues.

Is it usual for the nozzle to become lose so soon, and is the silicon of any benefit as it hid something I would have seen earlier?

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Nozzles can come loose, especially if you didn’t check it when first assembling ie loose from factory.
I use a torque spanner Something like this and tighten it when it is hot. The silicone sock is important as it helps regulate the temperature of the nozzle, keep spares as they are a consumable.

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