My little adventure with multicolor printing
I told this to my sister and then my fiancee, but neither of them seemed to appreciate it. So I gotta try the 3D printing community.
Last night I was doing my first proper multi color print on Ender 3 V3 SE, I say proper because I have done two in the past, but they all had just a single color change, this had multiple. Everything started off great, I was properly swapping filament each time. But I noticed that it did an over-extrusion (creating blob) each time it went to the prime tower. Those blobs added up to where you could hear the extruder going over them, but I decided to keep going since there were only one or two more color changes left.
I did my last color change and thought that it was all over, i was so wrong... As the extruder went to the model I realized it was missing it, it was unaligned on the X axis by about 10mm. I paused the print and tried to manually move the extruder, which didn't work. So I turned off the machine, move the extruder all the way to the left. Turned it back on and resumed the print, everything seemed to be back to normal...
20 minutes later I came back to check if everything is going well, only to see that nothing has changed. The extruder head was moving as it's supposed to, but nothing was coming out. As there was no visible clog from the outside, I touched the filament only for it to come loose. I (probably) didn't push it all the way in... Not wanting to give up on the print I let the machine run, while I attempt to edit the gcode in notepad. Since the last color change was on layer 7, I removed everything between the first layer and Z:1.4. Turned the machine off, remove the card, copied the new gcode and then let it do it's thing. It actually worked. Everything was back to normal after that.
Ps. I'll post my (default) prime tower settings in a comment, if someone can help me figure ot what wrong. I think the blob appears on the first extrusion after each color change, the other lines it prints seem normal.
TLDR: over-extrusion on prime tower caused blobs, which made the extruder unaligned. My mistake on the last filament swap, caused it to run for 20 minutes without printing anything. A gcode edit saved the print.