Printing Stuff

Naturally it didn't work right on the first try, but it was surprisingly effective as far as it went. I was printing a little calibration piece with 5mm steps:

Printed a few layers, then seemed to run out of filament, just a few strings coming out, so I aborted the print. After examining various things, I noticed this over at the filament feed:

Note the shadow of the filament only goes half way up the tube.The filament busted. No wonder it ran out. I noticed the brim it tried to print was just a fine smear, so I think the bed level was too high and it couldn't feed the filament, so the hobbed gear probably just ground down the filament which made it eventually break.

Or maybe the problem is that my five year old PLA filament is just too brittle? Tried another print, and it got farther this time, but again appeared to run out of filament part way through:

At least the brim printed better, and on the plus side, the edges of the calibration piece measure almost exactly 25mm (24.99 and 24.95 on different sides), so that's a good sign.

I suppose it could also be something wrong with the extruder design rather than the filament. A few things to investigate I guess.

Ah-HA! Using the "check the dumb stuff first" theory I backed off the spring on the extruder that forces the ball bearing against the filament, and got all the way through a print of the calibration piece without the filament disappearing on me:

The topmost cubes got kind of melty as it printed faster than the previous filament could cool. I need to get the cooling fan designed and hooked up, but could also try reducing the extruder temp for printing with PLA. The current default in cura is 200. I could even slow down the print speed, but I love how fast it whips around right now.

Here's a closer shot of the melty bits. The top three layers show some distortion, worst at the top:

All in all, much better than I expected my first print attempts to go. Never even had to hit the big red emergency stop button.

Summary: The Ascent of Jiggit

Trying to do more prints I kept getting broken filament. I think my PLA is just old and brittle, so I switched to some brand new ABS I got not too long ago. It seemed to work fine with a little hair spray on the glass bed, and there were no melty bits in the calibration piece, but the problem I had previously noticed with the bed tilting when it changes direction seemed to show up very obviously with the ABS print:

I'll have to think on the best way to try and fix this.