Drive Gear won't turn/feed ONLY on a few objects

#1
As title suggests, I had to export a couple designs to gcode today and when I went to print them they don't work. The Gmax printer takes its height measurements and begins to follow the print design, but nothing comes out of the extruder. I tried an older design as a check, and it worked perfectly. I opened the STL files in slic3r and it appears that all the settings are the exact same in both the old and new designs. It may also be worth noting that the new designs are forced into the front left corner of the plate, as opposed to being centered like all of my previous designs and I'm not exactly sure why.

Essentially, when I print an old design everything works fine. When I print a NEW design, everything works fine EXCEPT the drive gear doesn't turn and therefore no filament is used. I can switch back and forth between the old and new designs and the result is always the same, so I know it has nothing to do with the printer or filament feed itself. It has to be in the design somehow. Is it possibly because the design isn't centered? Is there some setting I have overlooked?

It should also be noted that the main person at my company who does the printing is on vacation. He took his laptop, and I was left to try and convert the file using some questionable methods. My boss gave me STEP files, which I then had to convert to STL using a webpage (I did this on two different websites just to be safe), and THEN convert to a gcode file using Slic3r.
 
#2
I would also like to point out that yes, the hotend will successfully purge. Literally everything is business as usual until I try to print the two new objects I created today. I ended up downloading CAD exchanger to change the STEP files to STL, just in case the websites I was using were corrupting the files. Still no luck. I am having my engineer send us a different format, as I have to assume this is an issue with the coding of the file and not the printer.
 

gCreate_Joshua

Administrator
Staff member
#3
Try downloading cura and install our configuration profiles available in the downloads section of this forum. You should be able to import the step file into cura. This may help.
 
#4
Thanks Joshua, I downloaded Cura and everything worked like a charm. Something about Slic3r was not allowing me to properly code the Gcode file. For anyone having similar issues, Cura works great. You still need a program capable of converting a STEP to an STL file, but I used CAD Exchanger and have heard good things about FreeCAD as well.