Got in to work yesterday with a nice little surprise in the form of an e-mail from the mailroom. My MakerBot: Replicator came! Yay!!
Unboxing of my MakerBot: Replicator.
After consulting with Jean and Shawn from Notcot.com about their MakerBot: Replicator, I decided to pick up the dual extruder model. The dual extruder model comes with (obviously) dual MK8 extruders, as well as 2 spools of 1kg ABS plastic.
Unfortunately, due to an issue I'm still sorting out with the guys at MakerBot, the RIGHT extruder is not working. The nozzle may be clogged, or had been damaged during testing or shipping (more on that below).
The accessories box includes a roll of wide kapton tape and the spool holders.
... as well as an unboxing guide, power brick, power cord, USB A-B cable, and two filament guide tubes.
The spools of 1kg plastics themselves were sealed in a thick, air-tight plastic inside their boxes. Might be overkill for ABS plastic, but I'd imagine a spool of PVA would benefit from this level of packaging.
Checking on the build platform itself, I noticed two damaged spots on the kapton tape.
It looks as if during testing, the extruder head didn't have enough clearance and nicked the tape in 2 locations. This could've caused damage to the RIGHT extruder.
Followed the video instructions on the MakerBot website. http://www.makerbot.com/docs/replicator/
I adjusted the build platform height by following the instructions on the LCD display, and began to test print. This is where problems started showing up.
The LEFT extruder loaded the filament easily and had no problems oozing a thin strip of plastic, but the RIGHT extruded doesn't seem to be able to get the filament past a certain point. I re-cut the filament to try again, but same result. It seems like there's some kind of blockage at the nozzle location.
Until I hear back from the guys at MakerBot, my guess so far is that somehow the nozzle nicked the build platform during testing or what not. However, there is no visible damage on the nozzle itself. The filament pulls in to a certain point, and a dull clicking noise can be heard.
One other possibility is that the nozzle is just clogged. I'm going to try and see if i can clear the nozzle with a needle or paperclip tonight and report back in with my findings.
After all the hooplah of trying to figure out what the heck is wrong with with my printer, I finally just swapped over to the working LEFT extrusion head in Replicator-G and did a test print while connected to my Windows 7 workstation.
The model was a quick boolean of a cube and sphere in Maya, then exported as OBJ to Replicator-G. OBJ meshes seem to be converted to STL internally in Replicator-G, so saves me a step between design and final output. :)
Definitely an awesome gateway drug to doing more DIY projects. As far as accuracy in real world units, I'll have to do more tests to see what the scaling factor needs to be in Replicator-G. Seems like scaling the Maya OBJ object by a factor of 10 is close to real world unit.
Maya OBJ > Replicator-G > *10 > MakerBot >
Sorry to hear about the R nozzel, hopefully it gets fixed soon. What is on your list of things to create? Tools? Toys? Props?
ReplyDeleteAlllll of the above haha.
Deletewow can't wait to hear more about it. I hear Jay Leno has the same for car parts
ReplyDeleteI think he has a much more expensive one though. They have some crazy ones that print colors as well. Any fun car part you're looking to get customized?
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