{"id":2609,"date":"2012-03-19T22:15:50","date_gmt":"2012-03-20T03:15:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.keegan.org\/reprapblog\/?p=2609"},"modified":"2012-03-19T22:15:50","modified_gmt":"2012-03-20T03:15:50","slug":"four-no-fourteen-months-part-5-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.keegan.org\/reprapblog\/archives\/2609","title":{"rendered":"Four, no, Fourteen months.. part 5 of ?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m catching up! I’m not as far behind as I was before. Hopefully with just a few more blog posts I can catch you all up to my current state of RepRap (which, again, is far ahead of what I’m currently blogging about – April of last year (2011)!<\/p>\n

Ok, so where was I.. At the end of the last post, I had just recovered from a catastrophic failure – I replaced my old melted X-carriage with a brand new OpenX carriage and had started printing. I was having extrusion problems again (resulting in rice-krispie consistency), but at least I was printing again.<\/p>\n

This seems like a good place to post something I often talk about regarding having printing problems and not knowing what to do about it. When doing RepRap printing, there seem to be times where something isn’t working and you have no idea what exactly is causing it. The problem is that there are so many things that potentially could be a problem that you have no idea which one needs fixing. I liken it to being lost inside a cave or mountain in the game Minecraft. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Minecraft, all you need to know right now is that it’s a blocky cube-based video game with a custom world for you, with hills, valleys, caves, mines, and you can dig and climb. Sometimes with RepRap it feels like you’re inside a mountain in Minecraft, and you’re lost, and you just want to dig your way out. When you’re lost in a mountain in Minecraft, for all you know, you’re right up against an outside wall, and if you just dug West by one block you’d be outside<\/I>, but instead you arbitrarily decide to dig East instead, and dig yourself deeper<\/I> into the mountain, still lost. (leave aside Minecraft tips like digging upwards in this scenario!).<\/p>\n

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It feels like that with RepRap sometimes. Hey, this print is awful.. should I adjust the tension on this belt? Or maybe a variable in the firmware about my rate of extrusion is wrong? What if I got a heated bed? The extruder! Maybe I need a new extruder!<\/p>\n

That. That problem where there are so many dimensions of variables that it’s tough to know what to do to improve your situation. Maybe all you needed to get back to working was adjust the tension on that one screw on the extruder idler (just half a turn!), but you instead decide to take apart your extruder to floss the hobbed bolt. That’s how I felt for a long time. It’s not entirely how I feel now, which is good, but I’m blogging about back then. So if you’re reading this and you’re like “YES! THAT’S HOW I FEEL!”, you’re not alone – you at least have the last-year-version-of-me in your camp too. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Looking back on my pictures, the next dimension that I tried tackling was the extruder. I arbitrarily picked East.<\/p>\n

One extruder that I wanted to build (which, spoiler alert, I still haven’t yet built) is the RepRap Universal Mini Extruder<\/A> (also here on Thingiverse<\/A>). That extruder uses 1.75mm filament.<\/p>\n

So I started with its heater barrel. I needed to make this on my lathe.<\/p>\n

First I figured out the angle for the cone at the tip.<\/p>\n

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