THIS BLOG HAS MOVED. PLEASE UPDATE ANY BOOKMARKS TO GO DIRECTLY TO WWW.RAISINGGEEKS.COM

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Living on "The Melting Edge"

Notice anything wrong with these pictures??




So far my RepRap experience is - receive parts, assemble parts, break parts, order more parts, repeat...

Tonight, from the time I opened the box with the new heat core until I was ordering more parts - 33 minutes.

Installed the heat core, built the hot end, let it hit temperature, then did a test print. Something was off, so I stopped it. about 20 seconds later, white smoke comes out of the nozzle. By the time I pulled the plug, this was the damage. The insulator is melted to the barrel and the heat core. The heat core was cracked, and didn't survive my attempts to free it.

I know 6 people with 3D printers - both MakerBots and RepRaps - at the moment, none of them are working - I think I'll call this being on the "melting edge" instead of "bleeding edge".

I knew this would be an adventure, just need to rebuild the enthusiasm a bit. Luckily the folks at MakerGear are awesome AND fast.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I feel your pain man, I'm in pretty much the same boat, having just put my MG kit together starting at the beginning of this month. I can barely print a test cube. Having awful trouble getting the thing calibrated.

I'm sure if someone who knew what they were doing got their hands on it, it would be spitting out nicely printed parts in no time, but when the operator has no clue...getting to that point is a long and winding road! :-(

Dek said...

Any progress with your RepRap at all?
I got mine to a pretty decent state but haven't printed anything for a while due to other projects/distractions.

Definitely moving up on the learning curve though.

Ian Cole said...

Dek - I haven't dedicated time to it. I think we will do a local 3d printer meetup day soon and I'll get some focused time with it...