Wednesday, October 20, 2010

printing well for a few days now

Things have been printing well for about 4 days now, I'm starting to get a small pile of mendel parts. I've solved the phantom print layers by unchecking an option about adding a raft when i've turned them off. Also I found that my printer wasn't moving high enough or the material was swelling and I had to adjust height the print moved each level. Last problem to get solved were that some files seemed to print in the wrong direction causing them to squish, or simply become blobs of uselessness. After receiving some advice that I can reorient things in the control program itself, that issue should no longer be a problem. Hurray!

Sunday, October 17, 2010

printing mishaps

Thursday I began attempting to print the first of my RepRap parts for the Mendel I've been working on for some time now. I would get part of the way through the print and the whole print would shift in each new row after that point. Thinking it was a bad file I redid the file to generate new code for the machine and this time it got further before the same problem began again. Thinking maybe the base file was flawed I tried another part. This part also was screwed up. That's when I found the problem. One of the drive belts/pulleys had gotten loose causing slack that would make the whole access fall out of alignment as it printed and hit that slack point. Having found this I cooled down the machine and attempted to tighten the tensioning part associated with that pulley/belt.
Today I updated the firmware, and the controlling software. Things were printing out wonderfully but again it became messed up at a certain point past the others. So first thing I checked was the tensioning part, and low and behold it appears to have slipped again. Looks like I'm going to have to try again or perhaps look for some other locking mechanism to hold it if it keeps slipping. So now I have to wait for it to cool down, then its back to fixing it up so I can try again.

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Well, the new extruder came last week, and I've scanned all the acrylic parts in case I need to replace any of them I can make exact replicas. After hooking it up and doing a heater test, and a filament test, I was set to go. This new extruder is majorly more reliable than the old one, and the power resistors don’t explode as I had a problem with my homebrew attempt. Also found out that my block was much larger which could have explained that problem as well.

Now that I have a reliable extruder I’ve been able to start calibrating the skeinforge settings again. I got a very rough but workable version going, but thanks to makerbot forum user Sideburn, I was able to use his setting profile for the heated bed, and I’ve been able to get some pretty decent results, it may just require a tiny bit more tuning to get it to run a little faster.

On a separate note I’ve completed assembling all the electronics for the Reprap I had started before purchasing the makerbot. I now hope to use the makerbot to print out the support parts so that I can complete the reprap. Hopefully once I have two bots able to run I can get more output perhaps work on an automated print system for at least one of them while I do normal printing on the other machine. Then it’s back to trying to make a CNC mill.