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:

I’ve been silent the past few days because my new jhead hotend arrived on Tuesday, from hotends.com. I have been far to busy tweaking the printer and actually printing things now to update this site. My printer is running great! Here it is as currently configured: The frame braces as well as the spool holder were printed by the printer itself in 1.75mm natural PLA. In comparison, this is how it looked after the first complete...

When I started the process of building my 3D printer, my overall goal was to primarily print in PLA due to it’s lower temperatures, less toxicity and biodegradability. Thus far my hotend has been nothing but trouble for this material. It can extrude ABS at higher temperatures with little issue, however with PLA it tends to get stuck quite often, and I have been working with the kind folks on the #reprap IRC chat to try to resolve it....

In my previous post, I was indicating some factors as to why my print head was clogging as well as a description of the particular hardware being tested. I since have done some more accurate tests (and even taken notes!) to get a better picture of the factors involved with the print head. I was under the misconception that not enough heat was the cause of some of my extrusion issues, so with my very shaky understanding of the properties of...

As the title suggests, I was (unknowingly) attempting to run 1.75mm filament through a 3mm  inside diameter PTFE rod to my hotend. I ordered all of the hardware for my kit from the same location and everything was specified in 1.75mm dimensions for the filament – I made the mistake of assuming that I received what I had ordered. The PTFE rod, when I did measure it, turns out to be 3mm. Due to the pressure required to force filament...