Sunday, December 21, 2014

Africa!

So this is why I couldn't make an update post right away mid November.  My first items once I calibrated was I decided to print Africa!  My sister-in-law is in Africa for the Peace Corps and I wanted to send her something special in our Christmas care package.  I found this item Thing 11159 which was a puzzle of Africa! I thought what a perfect item!  It was crunch time and I had to get this printed to send out our package ASAP since the shipping time is pretty long.

 Well I cant really rotate the image but here ya go! I happen to have 4 colors of filament, and 4 is all you need to have no 2 colors touch each other!!!! On some of the big countries I aborted the printed when 1-2 layers were left. This was to conserve plastic and time. 

Southern Portion 

Eastern Portion

Western Portion


 Hint Key

I had to add Gambia which can be found here 


4hrs a night for 4 days in a row! Basically 1 color a night. I cannot believe the quality of these prints. The printer is working perfectly now!  The only thing that could have made this better was if I was able to palletize with my printer so that I can load a bunch of countries for one color at one time. That way I wouldn't have to babysit it. Some of the small countries were only 2-3 minutes.





Problems fixed!!!!

I cannot even begin to say how excited I am to bring these updates.  I finally got my printer back up and running! It has been down since spring when I had the melt down on the extruder.  The second extruder just did a crappy job.  I couldn't find any solutions to the multitude of problems I was experiencing.  It was really upsetting and made me not even want to try.  I spent multiple Saturdays for hours on end trying to make it work. Finally I admitted complete defeat.  I was on the verge of cannibalizing my machine to make a new one all together.

I decided I was going to purchase a new hot end as a last effort, if it didn't work I would then indeed cannibalize my machine. Instead of choosing some random supplier and risking getting some garbage extruder like I did with my first replacement, I decided to go to my original supplier makerfarm.

I purchased a new Hexagon hot end, a new hobbed bolt, and a new Greg's Accessible Extruder (printed parts only since I figured my previous bearings and everything were still good). I also purchased the extruder so that I knew that the gears would mesh right since mine were very worn.  I put my full trust MakerFarm

The day it came I spent the rest of the night getting everything together and in place.
Hot end and fan. It was stressed to me how important it was to cool the body of the hotend during the print.  Do not skip using a fan that blows on the body! Not on the tip where the plastic comes out, just the body. (Now makes me wonder if that was part of the problem with my second hotend?)  The other thing I love about this new hotend is that little rubber booty that holds in the thermister and insulates the tip of the extruder.  Very nice upgrade!

Extruder . Looking good :)

I then went into calibration mode (haha seems there is never ending tweaking with these machines) I followed the steps here for calibration.  Everything worked like a charm. Now time to test the machine out. All of this update actually happened in mid November but I had to hold off for specific reason :) More revealed in the next post.