I have no idea what happened, I’ve had this printer for about a month now and and have had many successful prints, but today while printing a piece in ABS, I heard a noise and saw that it had gouged a path into the build plate.
I have no idea what might have happened, it is a model that I designed myself, however the slicing was made in the same way as all my previously successful prints: using the Creality Print slicer with slightly tweaked ABS settings (but default height settings and the like).
Anyone got any idea why this sort of thing happens? I’ve looked around and there are couple similar topics, so it doesn’t seem to be an isolated case.
I have already contacted Creality through their email cs@creality.com, but would still like input from the people here as to why this happens and how do I fix it as I have tried to initiate a couple other prints that were already in the printer, but they also started gouging, so whatever happened it seems to have altered the Z offset of the printer and the self-check is unable to detect/fix itself.
Update: after reading some more and some stances where the issue somewhat fixed itself after a few self-checks, I tried to do the same and, after a successful self-check and leveling, I put it to extrude (mind you, I have already extruded successfully to remove the gunk from the destroyed plate) and, while it was successfully extruding the filament, the following picture happened, so I powered it off on the spot and am now waiting for it to cool off completely to disassemble and see what the hell happened here.
Update 2: Ok, so the hotend (which seems to be a Unicorn model?) merely got dislocated as it’s only held in place by friction which was more of a pain to deal with than I expected and might actually be at the heart of this whole issue .
Are unicorn hotends really safe if they’re only held against gravity by friction with filament being constantly pushed through it? Is there any explanation for this design decision?
Would it be safe to change the screws to bigger ones that will hold it in place? What issues could derive from doing so?