Idler broke... I broke it!

My 'Idler' broke! Well... I broke it! I applied too much pressure to it and 'snap' went the hinge. See photo:In recent times the extruder was performing poorly. The flow was struggling and weak. The hobbed bold seemed to struggle to feed filament also. You could hear the filament chipping. It wasn't good. I couldn't figure what was going wrong, and was suspecting a jam somewhere towards the hot-end. The nozzle temperature was reaching it's,...

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Look... no fender washers! (608 bearing Idler hub)

With feedback to my previous post suggesting stationary fender designs of any kind were really the wrong direction to be going to reduce belt friction, I "bit the bullet" this evening and went to work on proper hubs for my idler bearings! Here's one of my new idler hubs now fitted to my y-axis. You'll notice the absence of the large fender washers, and I'm glad to see the back of them! :)I began by reviewing the existing designs such as this...

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Belt fender and other ideas...

The traditional Mendel design has large stationary metal washers (fender washers) on either side of the 608 bearings keeping the drive belts on the bearings. The problem many people have experienced with this arrangement is the belt can rub and grip on the washer, causing resistance and leading to motor step skipping, that can ruin a print job.Despite spending a lot of time aligning my pulleys with the belts on both the X and Y axes, ensuring...

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"We can rebuild..."

"We have the technology... we can rebuild..." It's more like "spot the difference" really, but regular followers will observe that the transition from wood to plastic has commenced. I've replaced my wooden x-axis components with newly printed plastic (PLA) ones. As I've become more fussy about print quality I've realised a little looseness here and there, and tiny wobbles in the z-rods were showing up as patterns in my printing. I've printed...

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More extruder improvements...

My extruder design has evolved some more... The last iteration (seen here ) worked quite well, but would succumb to jamming after a few hours of printing. After having to dismantle it once too often it was time to think things out a little further. Here's my latest construction, and some detail on the changes I've made.Latest extruder iteration pictured above, printing a set of PLA bushings for a friend.Pict (above) showing most of the...

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Gen6 Electronics cover...

Recently, there was a neat cover for the Gen6 electronics posted to Thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:12302It was just what I needed. Up until now my electronics sat to the front of the printer, and quite exposed, as you can see here in an older post. I also wanted to fit a different sized fan than the 40mm one in the original cover design, so I drew-up my own fan holder in Sketchup and printed that off also. It's great having...

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Fridge door shelf repair... Putting the 3D printer to a practical use!

The 'drop-in' shelf in our fridge door broke again this weekend. The original design had weak tabs that hook the shelf on to the door. I repaired these tabs before with epoxy resin but it failed again at the weekend.It was an excellent opportunity and exercise to apply all the design and printing skills I'd been building up over the past while. I started by taking some measurements from the broken shelf bracket and the tab on the door that held...

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Graphing temperature - Part II

Being able to easily graph temperature has allowed a quick evaluation of heating performance with different fan positions and air flow arrangments. The primary objective of the exercise was to find a good balance between active cooling (fan) and heating the 'heater-block' to a given target temperature.The active cooling is necessary to prevent heat rising through the stainless steel tube to the cold-end. Since my design does not incorporate...

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Graphing temperature - Pronterface manual 'hack'

I wondered if there was a better way to log the temperature change over time as the heater block warmed up. It's only something you'd do occasionally if you were assessing something in particular, so it's just a bit of fun, and may be of value to others. I had observed how Pronterface would read the temperature at regular intervals and echo the reading to screen, once the 'monitor printer' box is checked. If you leave it 'echo' as the heater block...

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