More 3D Prints, More Fails

Well shxt wouldn't you know it - today is already the second to last day before the vacation is over for the Christmas and New Year holiday. It has went by extremely fast and I have not done hardly anything. I wanted it that way from the start so I could relax and not feel stressed out whatsoever.

It has worked wonderfully and I do not feel stressed out at all, instead relaxed but with my mind going one hungered miles an hour with regards to all the things that I want to accomplish still before the days are over. Yea, not going to happen I know unless I cram it all into one day tomorrow which is pretty much par for the course for us to do.

All said and done it has been nice I just need to get my body and mind use to getting up with the alarm again and not staying up until 2 or 3:00 am every night. While I seem to me more of a night owl lately, it's not good for my going back to work mental state and performance.

More Print Testing

So we did some additional research in the printer trying to find out why it is not printing as good as it should or why it is not making a clean print.

Initially we focused on the print bed adjustment known as the 'Z' but soon found that this measurement was all over the place with each calibration. Not by a small amount either, instead a decent amount that would make an obvious difference whether good or bad.

We did several auto adjustments as well as finally doing a manual one with about the same amount of luck, or lack thereof to be honest. I then determined that the printer had two kinds of material in it because that is another reason behind getting this model. I wanted to be able to use the ABS for the prints and then the PLA for the supports/rafts.

Then it hit me today; what if this test print was set to be printed out only using PLA material since that is what it comes with from the factory? Each novel most likely needs to use its own temperature based on the material so if I was heating for PLA when ABS may have needed more heat due to the lack of a heated print bed then I would never get a decent print!

So I swapped out the ABS orange color, left the black PLA cartridge in the right side and put a neon green PLA cartridge in the left. The print immediately seemed to be doing better, for 3 minutes or so anyway until the glue gave out or something along that nature happened. The print head started dragging parts of the print around as well as screwing up other parts that were looking "decent" initially. Well crap, have to manually stop that print and see what the hell is going on with this thing once again - back to the drawing board!

I tore off the print, went back to the drawing board and started over. This time I set the Z gap manually and put the glue into the print bed in a very specific manner, letting it dry for a very long time as I had in the past although a tad more this time because I did put it on a little bit thicker and in a different swirling motion and direction than previously.

The Print

I started the print a few minutes after I began this entry and I am happy to report that it's looking awesome so far according to Cicely. I have yet to take a look at it because I don't want to be bummed if it looks crummy. It's not like it's a big deal to do it over but it does take something like 5 or 10 minutes to calibrate and then another 15 minutes or more for the "glue" to dry on the print bed and of course the test print takes nearly 17 minutes to complete.

Nope Better Luck Next Time

So the print was SO CLOSE this time to being awesome! We were around 75% complete when I felt something hit my leg, it was part of the print that it starts out with for the sample by writing the word 'hi!', the 'h' flew out and this meant that the rest of the print was doomed any moment now and would release from the print bed, exactly what it did and I had to once again stop the print and start over with another test.

Maybe tomorrow will be a better day for testing or later tonight I can run a few more tests and see what we come up with. So close but feels so far away and so friggin' finicky as many have mentioned that these things are to use.

Let's not forget that the rolls of ABS and PLA run $49 each and every time we mess up a print we are throwing money down the drain. It's part of the process though I suppose and I will, I mean we will get there at some point even if it takes us a couple hundred dollars of material to do so, ha ha ha.

More on all of this tomorrow if we have a chance to play around with it some more. I really want to start printing a few of the awesome designs that Cicely has in her head to see how cool they look in real life and tangible versus now, stuck in a book of amazingly awesome ideas that very few ever get to see!

Wish us luck! My bet, based on others is that we will need it, well luck and patience for that matter otherwise we had better cut our loses now!

**Update: By the end of the night when we finally decided to stop messing with the printer we had a really nice print come out that I would consider a success! The pattern looked great on the bottom, or the first layer that-is, and everything looked clean. It's a little difficult to know for sure how it would have done on a larger print, I think that it would have been successful as well. I think the instructions telling users to wait for the glue to dry is a big mistake as well.

The best prints that we have gotten so far were the ones where I said "heck with it" and started the print immediately after applying the glue. This made sense to me and it made the print stick to the platform very well. More on this tomorrow when we try to print a few more things other than the test print pre-loaded on the Cube. That was the successful print yesterday so I will use that or one of the other prints that we do today as the photo for the day tomorrow. Until then, have a good one and if you are doing any 3D printing - consider it a test of patience and the building of your character and problem solving skills as you watch time and money spill onto the print-bed unsuccessfully.

Photo: Here is a photo of the 3D printer that we own. It's the Cube 3. Not a very good photo. We have found that the light in our home office sucks for photos.