Thursday, March 20, 2008

Blob #1

Ran into some problems with the extruder. It's very hard to keep it extruding at a consistent rate. Currently using compression springs tightened down pretty hard. That seems to keep things going.

Spent some time playing with the various settings. Documentation on what each setting does can be found here. Noticed that, with my version of the host software (0.8.3), setting Extruder0_OffsetZ to 0 caused occasional I/O errors. Setting it to 1 seemed fine, though.

The blob pictured above is supposed to be Minimug.stl and it's roughly the right size and shape. The key word here is "roughly". This run was done at the highest extruder speed I could manage, the heater running a bit hot and no fan attached. End result? It's a bit wibbly and it leaks. Definitely not toast-worthy.

Got some good information out of it, though:
A margarine container lid works well as a build raft. The plastic sticks to it nicely.
The parts that printed correctly are quite solid. Very good adhesion between layers.
The X, Y and Z scaling's pretty close. Might need a bit of tweaking but not much.

Next step will be to run it again at a slower speed.

1 comment:

John Gilmore said...

Congrats! That's some major progress. It looks like you're almost there. I've got a considerable ways longer to go than that, and I envy you... Thanks for the inspiring posts, it's good to know of the failures and semi-successes especially.