3D Printer Problem: do you know How to Fix Z-Wobble?

New to 3D printing. Oh dear god what did I get myself into.

The journey of finding this problem mimics a lot of my experience with FDM printers. You start getting a bit crazy after a while, bordering into the realm of superstition. Great job engaging us all the way through, I love a good problem to try and noodle on. Happy Holidays

Ran a 100 Ender 3 farm at one point. The problem you're experiencing is due to debris inside the threads of the brass Z-Rod guide. You have to disassemble and remove the rod to clean the brass threads inside the guide. Cleaning and lubricating the rod without disassembly can move the debris out of the threads in the brass, but eventually the debris will build up again and cause the issue. As you can imagine the issue can present itself more often in a dusty environment . Also, sometimes the rods are over greased from the factory and debri sticks to the grease and gunks up the brass guide.

I really like how you engage and solve the problem, makes me feel like a participant. Usually people just go straight into the problem and give some generic solution with little depth. Also I appreciate the book recommendation, goes immediately into my shopping basket. ❤

Oh the book author is Sean the "3D Print General" who has been banned from YouTube for intransparent and likely bogus reasons, big machinery gone wrong. I'm sure he'll appreciate the support.

excellent tutorial! 👏

just came back to say that i had this problem, although not as severe, and took your advice and loosened the screws. made a massive difference right off the hope. printing so much better now. thank you for making this video.

Yep, you nailed it. I spent the better part of a year trying to pinpoint this issue on my S1 and even went to the extreme of installing oldham couplers and anti-backlash nuts on the printer - neither of which made an appreciable difference and if anything, those parts (or at least the way I installed them) contributed more to the rods binding than they did to resolve anything. I retained the oldham couplers but loosened the screws on the gantry as you said, and also removed the anti-backlash nuts, assuming the additional thread and spring pressure were adding friction to the rods. Immediate improvement to the part surface. My thanks for your fantastic troubleshooting!

Lead screw binding typically manifests as a regular repeating pattern that matches the lead distance of the screw. One thing not mentioned is that debris in the extruder can cause this as it will change the flow rate while printing.

That was a great diagnostic video and a thoroughly logical approach to solving a 3D printer issue. You are so right when you say "if you don't like doing 3D diagnostics, you won't like 3D printing". I easily spend a lot of time in diagnostic mode with mine. Above all else though, I really liked your colour palets, it just made the whole thing that more enjoyable to watch. You must have spent days printing all these test parts.

I really loved how you tackled the problem you found yourself in. Also it's great to see another video upload from you again in such a long time as well. Wishing you a happy holidays Geek. :)

It's crazy that this was uploaded so recently. I got this exact issue and was debugging it and then I found this. Also, excellent frikkin video my dude. Extremely useful and easy to digest information

I just got my copy of Sean's book today and after flipping through just a few pages it became obvious why this is a must have item for any 3D printer user. Thank you so much for recommending it. I am using an Elegoo Neptune 4 Max. Fortunately it's a newer revision so several of the issues that were being reported seem to have been mostly fixed. I am experiencing some minor quality issues with my prints but at least I know about Z-binding now and am hopeful that some lubrication on the rods will clear it up before it gets any worse. Great work!

Your storytelling is impeccable, love it!

Had the exact same issue on my S1, leveld the Z-Gantry again, the Z-Nuts were extremely tight on one side, adjusted the V-Wheels again and it works like it should again. Thanks for the video getting me to the point of failure

Wow. Thank you so much! This is the second time you've saved my prints. I encountered the mysterious blobs issue a while back and after seeing your video, reformatted the SD card I use and got smooth prints again (I now assume memory fragmentation made it slow, as it had been used for astrophotography with many write/erase/rewrite cycles). Now, I had a slight layer shift issue, so slight that I couldn't tell if it was Z binding or actual layer shift. I adjusted the bolts on my rods like you did out of despair after trying everything, and it now prints good as new! Thank you so much for making these videos. They are treasures of information, so well explained and documented, so useful!

When David Altenburg retires, you can take his place as a narrator. But to be fair, very, very detailed and well made video!

I actually love troubleshooting problems like this. Even though it can get rather frustrating, the satisfaction after you find the problem and come up with a solution is wonderful. I fought a stubborn over extrusion issue in my anycubic kobra 2 for months. I calibrated the esteps multiple times and they were dead on. Temp changes didn't help and it happened with every filament. It happened from brand new and out of the box. I was able to mitigate it with flow settings in cura but i constantly had to adjust them as no single flow rate resolved it. One printe might work great at 95% whereas another world be best at 70%. It was maddening. I went through 5 brand new nozzles so that couldn't be it... could it? I finally changed to standard volcano nozzles and low and behold flow is dead on now.

Can’t wait to try this when I get back from my vacation! I’ve had the same issue with my Neptune 3 Pro for a few months and couldn’t find a simple and easy way to troubleshoot. This should get me back on my game in no time!

Love your work man, the one about the accordion player is just pure class