It is well established that all micro electronics work by containing an active loop of magic smoke. As long as the magic smoke is contained within the circuit everything works well. However, many things can conspire to break this wonderful system. You will know when this happens, because you will observe the magic smoke leaking out of your device. In all seriousness, a bad crimp on a heavy gauge wire going to the heated bed platform...

I posted the other day the lastet build description of my Prusa Mendel i2. I used that build to print a new set of parts that were printed with a focus on part strength and solidness as opposed to economy of printing. After I had a full set of parts ready, it was time to tear it all down and rebuild it. Here is a picture of the basic framework assembled: Note there are some changes from previous build and a stock i2 build: I removed the...

    After my latest refinement of my 3D printer, I found I was starting to get some really decent prints. Yesterday I received some very nice 1.75mm PLA from Revolution Printers, and decided to try it out. This filament prints very evenly at 200C, and produces a very nice glossy surface. These two “Teethy Tiki” models from cereberus333 are straight off the print bed, printed with a 0.4mm nozzle at a 0.25mm layer...

I have taken a lot of photos, but have not really posted much to the site so far. I was meaning to post more of the build, but got caught up playing around with different ideas and parts for the printer. From this I have learned a fair bit and recently rebuilt the printer to something closed to my ideal for the Mendel design. I immediately put it to work to build some nice really solid parts to be rebuilt with. Better, faster, stronger. I...

I discovered that the green plastic I recently started printing with was black light responsive. I looked up the specs for the black lighting I had installed in my PC and found it would probably run OK on the printer’s power supply. I quickly designed some clips in Sketchup and printed them off. The result is a pretty cool visual effect while it is printing: