This happened last night.

[Jeeplvr]

Found this this morning. Apparantly I ran out of filament on the spool and the extruder got yanked off its mount and melted into the model. Lucky I didn't burn the house down.

DSC02480.JPGDSC02478.JPGDSC02479.JPG

[radicalrealign]

Oh wow, that sucks. How much damage was done? Could you simply put it back on, or did it damage any of the parts? Never have had this happen to me, but then again I never ran out of filament when I wasn't watching my printer

[apc7654]

What brand of printer was it?

[Donny M. Carter]

Hello, did the extruder hit something?

[Jeeplvr]

Its an UP Mini so the extruder is held on with a couple of magnets. It doesnt take much to knock it off. The end of the filament was looped thru the spool and from now on it will be the first thing I cut off so the filament will just run out instead of destroying things.

[Jeeplvr]

This stuff never happens when I am watching the printer.

[LambdaFF]

This raises the question : how do you plan a print and ensure availability of sufficient material ?

[Roxy]

This raises the question : how do you plan a print and ensure availability of sufficient material ?

PronterFace tells you how much (how long) filament you need to finish the print when you load the GCode. But it is hard to tell how much is on a spool!

[CaptainObvious]

PronterFace tells you how much (how long) filament you need to finish the print when you load the GCode. But it is hard to tell how much is on a spool!

I should be easy to calculate the weight of the filament from its length, Cura does that; then you only need to know the weight of an empty spool, substract it from the spool + filament and then you can see if it's enough or not.

[CaptainObvious]

Awwww... what the heck, let's get the calculator.

So, PLA has a densitiy, IIRC, of 1.2 grams per cubic centimeter. I have 1.75mm filament loaded up on my printer, I opened a GCode on Pronterface and it tells me it's 7221mm long.

So, first to get the weight of filament per centimeter (10mm), good all cylinder volume formula Pi*radius squared * height.

First the radius: 0.175 / 2 = 0.0875^2 = 0.07675, let's make that 0.0077

3.14 * 0.0077 * 1 = 0.021 cubic cm per cm of filament. At 1.2gm/cm^3 that's: 1.2 * 0.021 = 0.0252. So 0.0252 grams per cm.

722.1 cm * 0.0252 = 18.2 grams total for the object.

I just weighted the actual print and it was 22 grams, but it's been painted so it doesn't look to be too far off.