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Is my stepper motor failing?
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this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2025
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Unlikely that it's the stepper. It sounds like something's scraping. I heard similar noises after inconsistent extrusion on infill, so that the infill was standing up a little bit and the print head was scraping over it.
Could also be ball bearings or something else in there that's scraping over something. It is most likely something connected to the motion.
I've checked the print it was working on and changed the Z-offset, had no influence on these scraping sounds. It's definitely somehow connected to the extrusion, that's why I assumed it to be the stepper.
Do you think those really tiny bearings used for the extruder axis' can make such a sound? Other than that I'm really out of ideas outside basically sanding down anything that could be the problem… I even made sure to print the whole MK4 extruder you see in the video on the Prusa MK4S of my local hackspace to make sure it has perfect dimensional correctness etc.
In the middle of the print change the flow modifier to 0%.
That will turn off the extruder while leaving everything else as-is.
I suspect it's the X or Z bearings.
Please don't sand anything. If your problem is wear, adding wear will not help.
Another thing you can do is move the print head up, and while not printing anything just extrude 100mm of filament. Then you will only hear the extruder.
The only thing in the extruder that I would expect to make a noise like that would be if it's a geared extruder with seriously abused gears that are slipping. But then you'd see extrusion problems.
In general, the extrusion motor should be way to slow to create such high-frequency noises, unless your motor control is seriously wrong setup.