Categories
3D Printing

This is what 60 3D Printed Ear Savers look like!!!

Above is a picture of the 60 3D Printed Ear savers that I made for a friend who is a nurse in Philadelphia. She will be handing these out to all of her friends at the hospital.

If you are interested in learning more or would like your own please contact me with the contact us page.

Categories
3D Printing

My 3D Printer is Fully Operational…..Again

At the beginning of this whole pandemic I mentioned to my wife that I would really like to get a 3D printer. My wife who is very supportive of me and everything I do (that is not a joke) said sure. So the shopping began. We settled on this 3D Printer from Amazon which was about $380 at the time (Link below).

As you can see it is a pretty modest setup and I have to say for the most part it has been a pleasure to work with. HOWEVER I have had numerous clogs which have hampered me as well as my most resent outage which I will now get into.

I was asked by a family friend who is a nurse in Philadelphia to print out some ear savers so she can give them to her nurse friends. It is a very simple job, I thought no problem It will be a piece of cake. well 3 batches in and my print bed which is manually leveled gets out of wack. This is not uncommon and considering the amount of movements the bed has to make. The batch I am working on gets really messed up and I had to cancel the job. I cleaned off the bed and attempted to start the job again. Then I started to hear this really strange noise coming from one of my fans. I powered off the printer to and let it cool down to see what was going on and low and behold I found that filament had been wrapped around and inside the cooling fan. I attempted to remove it all with the tweezers and then crunch. my thumb went through the fan. Not my proudest moment.

So I tell my wife what happened and immediately go onto Amazon to look for a replacement. Let me tell you how hard it is to find a 30 mm 24v .05 Amp fan….. very. But I eventually found one that fit as seen below.

Fast forward 2 days and they arrive. I was very excited, and I waited at the door with anticipation for the Amazon delivery person to leave the package on my step. I went and hooked it up, and preheat the filament I had installed, and I get an error. Uncontrolled temperature, please reset. So I power off the unit and I see that my temperature sensor for the tip was not in it’s hole. So I try to put it in……

So I went back to Amazon and found new temperature sensors

Luckly I was able to find these without too much trouble, however I also learned that they were way too long and needed to be terminated to fit my 3D Printer. So back to Amazon I went to order the correct fittings and a crimping tool.

Needless to say my wife is loving me at this point. So Monday I finally sat down and put it all back together, even learning how to use this style crimping tool (I have only ever used one for RJ-45 and RJ-11 terminations).

So far the printer is running well and we will see how it goes.

I hope you found this post helpful and I hope to do more in the future about some of the things I have printed and I would eventually like to figure out how to connect it to a Raspberry Pi as a print server.