3D Printing woes

Oh look, a post that I started….In December. On the 28th of December no less.

It’s now the 4th of February 2024.

Apologies….

Welcome to Matt's blog - something that ends up being updated once every few months. 

We're fast approaching the end of the year.  

Yeah.

Nevermind.

That’s all I got. Wasn’t even really any point in keeping it in there, except to prove that I was thinking about maybe doing a blog post, and I kinda got distracted.

I guess it was a fairly weird time for me. I’d effectively finished my old job, but was still employed and hadn’t yet started my new job. I was in a pretty odd headspace, and then since starting the new job I’ve been pretty tired - its been going fantastically and I’m loving it, I’m in a great place right now.

It’s Sunday afternoon, there’s a really good piece of beef cooking in the oven, the Yorkshire Pudding mixture is resting in the fridge. The veg is prepped, aside from the asparagus - I’ve left that downstairs by accident, I need to go and grab that in a sec - but after I’ve finished writing this, otherwise before you know it, it’ll be April and there will be another code block with this being yet another half written post.

I’ve been having issues with the Prusa for a few months - I put it down to the change in temperature - at one point it was that cold in the MattCave (10 degrees C) that the printer completely refused to turn on. Complained that the temp was far too low and that obviously there was a problem with the sensors. So I had to get the room temp up above 15 before it would even entertain the idea of printing something for me.

It’s been mainly weird little fidget dragons for the kids, a couple of tool type things, but not really all that much aside from a couple of board game organisers.

Anyways, I kept getting Thermal Anomalies - and when you get one of these, the printer pretty much decides there’s going to be a fire, so it shuts down.

No idea why, did a thermal model calibration, seemed to fix it for a print or so. Then it would do it again. I’ve been feeling pretty crappy about it.

Since we left the EU, there’s only a year warranty on it now - and that’s up in March. So I decided to get in touch with them to see if they needed to send me a new hotend to repair it.

The support were amazing, I spent most of my day off on Friday talking to them. We went through the symptoms, then they asked me to take a photo of the hotend from the bottom.

Those of you who know anything about a Prusa, might notice the problem here - I didn’t realise. But the hotend isn’t meant to be that way round.

This was a factory assembled unit, but I have changed the nozzle a couple of times, it must have gotten twisted around when I was changing a nozzle and then I’ve put it back the way I thought it went - and then the stupid fan shroud has melted on there.

The melt is probably what caused the Thermal warnings. I scraped that off, and now its not touching. It was a replacement from Ebay made from PC so I think that’s why I had the issue this particular time (even though its probably been the wrong orientation for about 6 months)

The cable that’s burned through, has only gone through to the next layer, its still fully shielded and is safe. All the wiring tests passed.

It does explain why I’ve been going through fan shrouds like there’s no tomorrow. Even though those things do seem to melt without warning, it helps if the hotend isn’t touching it.

Support had me dismantle the extruder assembly to get the hotend out just to double check that there weren’t any issues with it and to just reseat the thermistor as it looked like it had moved.

After that, I put it back together and it looked like this, the right way round.

Support had me run a PID calibration, then a TM calibration. Then I started a print.

Perfect, no warning.

I had the printer out of the extruder and in pieces on my (3d Printed) gaming tabletop.

I took the opportunity to clean it up, re-grease up all the rods and re-route some of the cabling around the Raspberry Pi running Octoprint too. Rather than it being thrown in the back of the enclosure, it’s ‘mounted’ on a cable tie.

It’s out of the way and it looks alright anyway.

Once it was all cleaned and back together, it went back in it’s corner.

I ran another print, no warnings.

I ran another print after that, no warnings.

It’s running beautifully. It hasn’t skipped a beat, and you can probably catch it livestreaming on the main page right now.

Picked up some multicoloured filament from Amazon which is something that I’ve not done before. It’s pretty funky. I like it.

Luke chose it. He wanted (another) fidget dragon thing, and he wanted one for his mate too.

Electricity is stupid cheap today (10p a unit on Octopus tracker, so it’s not like its really costing anything anyway)

Right I’d best get on with the reverse sear of this beef. It’s almost had 10 minutes to sit after being in the oven for a few hours on low, reaching an internal temp of between 50-55ish.