The title is a reference to a previous post My first 3D project – “Disneyland is fun. This is not fun” where I vented my frustrations at problems I was having. Things have not improved much over the last few days. I started having print issues. Prints would fail. They wouldn’t adhere to the bed, or the layers seemed to not adhere. At one point a print failed such that the extruded plastic built up in a nasty globule around the nozzle. I didn’t take pictures, sorry for those of you who are visually-oriented people, I was so frustrated I started cleaning off the plastic right away.
So many things wrong
To clean up the glob of plastic, I had to remove the hot end and remove the plastic air routing shroud to get all the melted PETG off the heater block. Then I put it back together and decided that I should level the bed, again.
Something I had noticed when leveling previously is that my bed isn’t 100% flat. There’s a slight bulge in the middle. When leveling the edges are a little lower and the center is whilte a bit tighter. It’s been working so good that I figured that the 10th of a millimeter difference wouldn’t be enough to cause problems. But maybe I’m wrong. So I figured I would try shimming up the edges.
I got a piece of thick (cardstock?) paper, cut it to fit, and put a piece under each end and releveled. Not perfect but much better than before. So, I tried a print. It failed.
Adhesion was good, nothing broke loose and floated around like would sometimes happen before (which is why I thought maybe that small bulge in the middle was the issue) but it looked like it was no longer tracking from side to side accurately. Shit, did I break something when I removed and cleaned the print head module?
I checked the hot end to make sure it wasn’t loose. No undesirable movement and it felt good on the track. I checked and re-tightened the belt as it was a little loose. I thought that must be the problem. Try again.
It failed. Still not tracking well side to side. A little better, maybe, but it still drifted. The prints looked like a stack of coins pushed to the side.
WTF
Quitting is always an option
I know. I should say something inspiring, like “Quitting is not an option.” or “Quitters never win and winners never quit.” or “The key to success is being born into the right family.” or whatever. But, quitting is always an option. Then I remembered a YouTube video I watched a few weeks back. I can’t remember who did it so if someone knows what I’m talking about please leave a comment so I can give credit where due.
The host told a story about how he got frustrated with issues he was having and vented his frustrations to a co-worker and friend. That friend told him, I’m paraphrasing here,
Don’t get so upset. You do this is for fun, there’s no pressure. You’ll figure it out.
Sometimes I get really frustrated with this stuff, but ya, I do this for fun and there aren’t any deadlines. No one will die (well, maybe the guy I keep in the basement as motivation by committing to not give him food or water until I get this working), and the world will keep rotating. Deep breaths, I’ll figure this out.
End of tunnel, meet light
I looked at the hot end again to see what I was missing. Why was it slipping now? The belt was tighter than a … never mind I’m keeping this family-friendly, it was tight. And then …
Well, there’s the problem. If you’re not familiar, the bumps should be down so they fit into the cogs so the belt doesn’t … well slip. I removed the hot-end, flipped the belt, and tried again.
Things were looking really good until about half way through the print when this happened…
Now what? Then I noticed that the filament had apparently unrolled from the spool a bit (probably something I did) and gotten wrapped around the doohickey that the spool rotates on and became bound up. I was hopeful that this caused a feeder issue that lead to the messed-up print.
Payday
After fixing the bound-up fillament, cleaningoff the print bed, I tried again. I watched pretty close just in case something went wrong again but, after about an hour. I had a successful print!
The quality was pretty good. The support structure popped right out. There were some strange strings you can see on the right picture but I cut and burned these away.
I’m still not sure what fixed the problem. Was it the slight changes in settings? I dropped the temperature from 235C to 230C on the nozzle and increased the bed from 70C to 75C. Was it the shims on the bed making it just that little flatter? It could be that the wad of plastic I removed had been there a while, I never looked that closely at the print head before, could that have been the issue? I’m not sure, which is a little concerning, but as long as it’s printing well again, I’ll take this as a win.
The takeaway
Keep at it. Keep looking at things from different angles, try different settings, do some research, you’ll figure it out. There are a lot of things that go into a successful print, any one of them can cause things to go off the rails if they’re not just right. If you’re doing this as a hobbie, remember, this should be fun. Take this as a learning experience and whatever you do, don’t take it out on the dog. The cat’s OK. You’re mother-in-law too., but not the Dog, they just want to make you happy.