You know you're having a bad printing day when....

[Marm]

While printing out a last minute christmas gift that takes 5 hours to print, you accidentally hit the GFI reset button on the outlet with the printer...... Halfway through the print...... and have to start over....

Then when soldering, you almost mistake your soldering iron for your cigar.....

Grrrr..... one of those days.

[curious aardvark]

lol
Yeah, speaking as one who is currently printing gifts - I can sympathise :-)

[Marm]

AND THEN.... I tried an acetone treatment (that I had not yet fully tested!!) on a gift item printed weeks ago..... it's still gooey...... now I'm seeing how much filament I have available....

[Marm]

Well, to sum up that printing day... I had to wait for a component to be delivered before I could do final design of my project. It arrived the day before. Finished my design, started the print, then started the print again (see GFI above). And then it turned out the screws I was using were slightly oversized, and delaminated the whole thing. sigh.....

And then I realized I had used up all my glue.... ><

So.... luckily my 6 year old nephew got enough gifts that he didn't notice the lack of big gift from me. At least its a summer toy, and it can be delayed a bit. So I was going to finish the project properly and give it to him for New Years.

Except....

After that last build, the extruder head wouldn't heat up anymore. Software said it was heating, but the screen said it wasnt budging from 18c.

Out of frustration, I set the whole thing aside for a bit.

Came back to it today, tore it apart. Checked this, wiggled that, looking for obvious signs of injury. Put the thermocouple of my multimeter on the head itself... and voila... it's getting hot. Dunno what I fixed, but I wiggled something back into place.

So yay! Back in business. This thing is closing in on 200 hours, and for all the ways they have tried to make this a bad printer, it's actually pretty good. But I am really looking forward to my eventual DIY printer later this year, something that will do 350mm cubed.

[Bassna]

AND THEN.... I tried an acetone treatment (that I had not yet fully tested!!) on a gift item printed weeks ago..... it's still gooey...... now I'm seeing how much filament I have available....

That's odd. How did you go about doing the treatment? How much acetone, vapor bath even? When I vapor bath thing's, at the most, it take's 1 hour to dry. Probably less but I just let it sit. I use a rice cooker to heat up the acetone, and set the part on a small jig which I set inside. The process is fast, 20-30 seconds. I'm currently building a much bigger Acetone vapor bathing station myself for big parts. If you need any help/tips with it, shoot me a msg, I also have skype if you send me the username.

Also about the glue running out, if you just dab the part you want to glue in Acetone and stick it together with what you want it on, it will "meld" itself to it. Much better than glue imo.

[Marm]

I had a couple of solid wall cylinders lying around from an earlier project, they were mis-sized so they were scrap. I had an idea for a vapor bath, but turned out some of the parts i was going to use were ABS based, so it wasn't happening. So i had some acetone, and spare parts, so I dipped them. The results were very good, nice smooth finish, glossy, quick drying time. The 'production' parts were not solid thin wall, but had large volumes to them. That absorbed the acetone and let it continue to work, so they eventually became gooey.

And I ran out of glue for the hot bed. So I had to go to tape that didn't stick as well. But I'm back on track now.