Solving Glitches

Post date: Apr 2, 2014 10:57:48 AM

Mystery Plastic

Plastic that broke and fell out during shipping, resulting in a little visible gap in the plastic case

An odd piece of plastic fell out during shipping, and after flipping the printer around I found where its supposed to go. Well, there is a little bottom tab which broke off (which explains why it fell out), but managed to squeeze it back into place. That said, I think having little plastic pieces like these are a really bad idea...

Excess extrusion

Excess extrusion results in wild strands hooking onto the moving print head, ripping whole thing off the print bed.
Gah.

Close examination of the print process shows that upon starting to print, a tangible excess amount of plastic is extruded and that curls up on the print bed. It turns out that this causes the "raft" thats being printed to get hooked onto the print head (at one point in time or another), and eventually the whole print gets detached from the print surface and gets stuck onto the print head.

Fortunately, this is quickly solved by quickly pulling off the excess extrusion with pliers, just when the print bed is being retracted upwards. My next raft was rather successful, but the print was unusually rotated by the slicer without my knowledge... more on that later.