Quote Originally Posted by DaveB View Post
This failure did appear to be in the feed mechanism, and there was nothing but shavings from that filament loading up the stock QIDI feed gears teeth. I guess that's to be expected as the feed gear was spinning with no filament motion. Longest (and last) print I did with it was about 2.5 hrs.

I gotta say, getting to the extruder and such for these repairs is a real pain. I cannot imagine performing the level of maintenance that you regularly execute. I would be spending all of my free time dis and re assembling with no time left for actually printing. And it probably wouldn't work then because I broke something. I guess all that practice must have a positive impact on how quickly you can strip one of these apart, but it took me hours...
Another reason I love a RepRap system as everything is accessible and easily taken apart, and reassembled, like no tomorrow. On these Makerbot based things nothing is.

Oh, go look at your X belt, for instance, and when it needs tightening you have to take the entire dual extruder off then you can remove two screws (these are not metal screws so eventually they will strip since they bite into the plastic) AND when you have done all of that you are met with a continuous belt so you have to cut it so you can tighten it or simply replace it.

The X belt has a number on it that I believe means GT2 and is around 800mm (I can't remember the exact number precisely) long. No joy with the machine and how much you have to do to get to anything real on the machine in comparison to a RepRap which was created to have everything easily accessible.

Why is there no way to tension any belts on these machines with just adjusting a screw, or some sort of tensioner?