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...

After the original PSU blew up, I went through all of my electronics, wiring and soldering to ensure that it was really just an inadequate PSU, and not my wiring. I am satisfied that everything was built as designed, except the ATX unit that could not meet it’s rated spec. Not surprising for the price, but a bit of a bummer that someone sold me one with the implication it was up to the task. Moving on. I rebuilt the frame to make the...

I spent all my free time for a while assembling the i2 as close as possible to the original design, given the hardware, plastic parts I had and general spare hardware and electronics I had stored up for project parts. After gaining a mechanical idea of how the printer worked, I made a few changes – I put the Y axis motor at the back, and flipped the X-carriage around to place the gears on the belt side. The only wiring in the front...

I ordered my hardware kit, essentially the RepRap “vitamins” from a company by the name of A2APrinter in Toronto. I am writing this post after the fact, but I did make note of my experience with this company so far. The filament I specified on my initial web order was out of stock, however they informed me while processing the order and I was able to choose a different one they had in stock for the same price. It took them...