Never ending problems with v6 + Titan

Hi. A few weeks ago, I purchased from you a V6 All-Metal hotend with a hardened steel 0,4 nozzle to upgrade my Anycubic i3 Mega X, as I was reading on how much it would improve my prints. It didn’t. I barely printed anything for quite some time now. My Anycubic came with a V5 J-head pre-installed (assuming a clone), and a clone Titan Extruder, and all prints have been nice, I’ve printed in some filament brands without problems, mainly PLA (Anycubic – 190ºC and Fiberlogy Easy PLA – 200ºC).

After its arrival, I’ve proceeded to assembly the hotend, following the wiki and updated the printer firmware accordingly. Everything went smoothly, I had to print a “e3d adapter” prior (in ABS) to the installation in my printer to give it some height. I kept the original “fan/turbine“, as the adapter gave it some height to even the V5 and V6 heights.

I swapped the v5 for the v6 and as soon as I was going to test run the printer (after auto-tune PIDs and leveling the hotbed), using the same filament I was using (Fiberlogy Easy PLA), and as soon as I entered the printer menu to feed filament (at 230ºC), the filament would ooze out of the nozzle (the block was clean) but the extruder started grinding the filament. If I decreased tension, it would not pull the filament, if I increased it would grind without feeding. However, the filament would ooze out from the nozzle (the hole, not the screw).

I thought it had something to do with the extruder mismatch, so I’ve ordered a new one from YouPrintIn3d.de, and in the meanwhile I tried to swap the nozzle for the one that came with the hotend, so I disassembled the hotend again, double checked everything and reassembled it with the brass nozzle. It was the same. I thought it could be me not hot tightening correctly, so I tightened a bit too much… I broke the nozzle with the screw still inside. When trying to remove the heatbreak… you guessed it… I broke the heatbreak also. So, I went to the RepRap.pt store here in Portugal to purchase a new block and heatbreak, both genuine, for £45 (50€). When I reassembled everything together, with the hardened steel nozzle again (as I had broken the brass one) everything was the same. Meters of filament went to the bin because it was ground up a lot.

In the meanwhile, the Titan extruder with the compact but powerful motor arrived, together with 60cm of Capricorn Bowden Tubing. I assembled the extruder, but as the motor was different, instead of correcting the voltage, I used the original one. The extruder worked perfectly, in the tubing, until it hit the heatbreak. Then, the nightmare continued. This time, I noticed that the Bowden tube, even being pushed all the way into the heatbreak, it still had room for the filament to hit, just before entering the block. I confirmed it passing the filament without the nozzle. So, I went back to the PTFE tubing from the V5 hotend, it improved that part, but after trying to print, using 2mm of retraction and 40mm/s, it does the first two or three layers, with extreme stringing, and then it starts to under extrude to the point that the filament stops completely, and the extruder starts skipping/clicking. I disconnected the other fan and it happened all the same. Even when I simply extrude filament via menu (or OctoPrint), it starts to jam.

So, in this moment I’m starting to regret all the money spent to try to improve the quality of my prints, as I’ve spent £230 and in the end I ended up with a non-functional 3D printer.

Can someone please help me out in this matter? Increasing temperature doesn’t help, everything is tight, and the settings for retraction don’t do any good, as it doesn’t need retraction to clog up.

Cheers.