Silhouette Alta

Getting Started with Silhouette Alta®
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If your machine stops printing, check the filament. It may have run out or it may be stuck. Sometimes you
can simply pull the filament out from the top of the machine. But if the filament is stuck inside the hose,
there is no way to pull it out from the outside.
First, remove any filament that is being fed through the top of the machine. Push down on the grey
circle piece of the hose attachment while pulling the hose itself, and the hose will come away from the
connector. Open up the control panel in Silhouette 3D® to manually warm the filament up, and as soon
as it is warm enough, gently pull the filament from the nozzle and out of the hose. The rest of the filament
should come out of the hose during this process. Reattach the hose, load more filament in the machine,
and restart the print.
If the lines are squishing into each other when layers are being printed, the print nozzle is too close and the
machine needs to be recalibrated.
If the lines are printed too far apart and aren’t adhering to each other, the print nozzle is too far away, and
the machine needs to be recalibrated.
If the nozzle is moving but no filament is coming out:
The filament is stuck. Sometimes the filament gets stuck near the top of the print hose. The gear that
moves the filament in and out of the extruder can wear down part of the filament and cause it to stay
in place rather than feed through the machine properly. To fix this, simply pull out the filament, find the
section that is worn down (it won’t be as smooth or as thick as the rest of the filament), and cut off
that part. Then reload the filament into the machine. The machine should print normally.
The filament on the spool is tangled. It is easy for the filament to become tangled, and it may snag
and not come off the reel easily. To untangle it, you’ll have to remove the filament from the machine,
unravel the filament from the reel until any tangles are removed. Carefully place the filament back on
the reel and take care not to let it tangle again. Then reload the filament into your machine.
The nozzle head is clogged. You can use the tool with the thin metal piece and the plastic handle to
poke it inside and up through the nozzle head a few times to try and move around any plastic that may
have solidified. Also, check outside and around the nozzle head because sometimes the plastic will
coat the entire shell of the metal extruder portion of the nozzle head. If fixing those two things doesn’t
solve the problem, you can remove the hose attachment from the extruder head and use the small hex
key that came with your machine to push the filament out.
If a print has incomplete sections:
The filament is stuck. This tends to happen when the extruder isn’t able to pull out the filament easily.
Ensure that the filament doesn’t have any tangles and that the machine can easily pull more filament
to load into the machine.
The printing temperature may be wrong. If the filament is too cold, the filament doesn’t flow as easily
as it could, and that can cause the gear in the Alta to grind down a specific spot of the filament. This
may cause the filament to become stuck.