Well it's happened. I left my Mendel i1 happily printing late on Friday afternoon while I nipped over the road for ten minutes, I came back and it wasn't laying any plastic, everything was merrily running around as though it was printing but nothing was coming out of the nozzle. I hit kill and lifted the Z axis, I was intending to take off the idler on the extruder and clean it out as I assumed it had clogged up and was slipping on the hobbed bolt. Nope, it wasn't that, when I looked at the hot end the insulator was surrounded in a blob of solidified ABS. It had made its way out from the top of the insulator, how I don't know but it had so I had to strip down the extruder and hot end. Then as I was separating the insulator it broke off from its threads leaving me with one goosed hot end right in the middle of an important print that was urgent.

I don't have a spare hot end so it's been a mad rush to get one and I found a nice person who is sending me one in a hurry and hopefully it will be with me on Tuesday morning. This episode will teach me to look forward from now on, I will keep spares on hand, maybe two as I expand my machine bank to two and then more, again looking forward I think it would be prudent to keep building the same machine or certainly ones that are upwardly compatible so I can keep a minimum number of spares and cover all the machines.

I've lost a lot of hair this weekend, almost as much as I did when I first started building my machine in the early days when resources were a bit more stretched out and thin on the ground back in 2010 .... ahhhh happy days, I had loads of hair in 2009 and look at me now can anyone direct me to my nearest wigmaker.