Back with a 3D Printer

It has been over a month now since I wrote my last blurb. Life has been rather busy but I ended getting the Prusa i3 8" Printer from Makerfarm.

It comes as a kit but it was a lot of fun to build. Only additional items you will need are a piece of glass to print on and an ATX computer power supply to run 12V to power the board and printer. I assembled mine and did a few of the initial test prints to see how well I did assembling. I am completely new to this so I was not familiar with print temperatures and calibrating so my first prints were very crude. I contact Colin at Makerfarm for some pointers and he was very helpful and quick to respond. I checked the calibration and did some maintenance on my machine. It ended up I had to completely disassemble my extruder but this was rather painless. When I originally built it, I had a tough time putting the components together. In my case the plastic idler did not contact the filament and I did not have enough preload on my springs to extrude the plastic so I ended up with a few good layers of print, then a few bad and back to a few good.You can see in my print how spotty it was and offset.

My new prints are much improved now that I trimmed some material off my extruder and the fits are much better. I am working on my first large scale object but I printed a small piece last night that turned out very well. It has nice edges and a great radius on the one section.

I am still learning how to more effectively use Sli3er which creates the Gcode for the printer. Overall I love my printer and I think it was a great buy for the price. It took some work getting it honed in but you get to become more familiar with the machine itself. Highly recommend this printer to anyone else. I'll continue to post projects that I am working on and parts that I create. I'll manage a way for everyone to access my .STL files as well.