3D Printer

I bought a 3D printer. The one I bought is a Prusa Core One L+. All I’ve done so far is print a number of whistles and one large card holder that took around five hours to print. And as I expected, I’ve had a few issues, mostly, the nozzle clogs. But I also had an issue where the gears were skipping and there was a piece of filament in the gearbox. I purchased the printer with the understanding that it’s going to require a bit of tinkering to keep it working. That has definitely been true so far. I’ve only had it for a couple of weeks and have not used it much. I didn’t turn it on much the first week because it’s basically a little oven. Since it was in the 90s, I didn’t fancy turning an oven on. My little AC units were already working hard to keep the house cool.

Anyway, now that I’ve had to troubleshoot a bit, I have disassembled things and am getting a good feel for fixing things. Today I had to do a cold pull to get some stuck filament out. I took the nozzle out and used my hot air gun. To do a cold pull, you put a piece of filament in the nozzle and then heat it up. Let it cool a bit and then you can (hopefully) pull out the stuck piece with the filament that was just melted on it. There’s a way to do this automatically in the printer, but that didn’t work for me. And I was somewhat impressed that this worked at all. But happily it did.

The printer came with a tiny needle, which I guess is like an acupuncture needle, that’s used to clean out the nozzle. It’s quite handy and I have to be careful not to lose it. I’m very much getting the handle of loading filament and keeping the bed clean. I bought some 91% isopropyl alcohol to use for this.

My next task will be to learn Freecad so I can design my own parts. If I want to do something more artistic, I can use Blender for that. For now, to get the hang of printing, I’m mostly just printing out models I download from Printables.

I also need to find out where this printer will live. I think it should be located near my electronics workbench because I have used the hot air gun a few times to clear the nozzle. So I have to think about where everything will be. But for now, I’m still getting the hang of using it.