Printer is printing

So, last time I addressed a few of the things I learned and was still struggling with on my Printrbot LC, but now I have had my first fully successful print, and another less successful so I will address some of the things that I have learned so far.

Most of my problems have been with extrusion which unfortunately can have numerous causes. One of the biggest issues I had was actually that the idler itself was not freely moving. The ball bearing was actually rubbing up against a piece of the wood extruder frame, and causing a ton of resistance. I did not look at this until well after playing around a ton with the idler tension. This lead to lots of frustration and cleaning of the hobbed bolt.

Because I draw I happen to have kneaded erasers laying around, whereas my Xacto knives were in my garage leading me to try using one to clear out the plastic from the hobbed bolt. I discovered that this is a very good way to get them cleaned out very quickly. For those who are not familiar with a kneaded eraser they are designed to pull up charcoal but not destroy themselves like a plastic eraser. They can be shaped very easily. What i did was roll mine into a rounded cone and just dab the hobbed bolt with the tip. Spin and repeat. The advantage here over the Xacto knife is that it doesn't leave a bunch of little bits of plastic all over the place. Also you are not destroying a blade by rubbing it on a piece of metal.

With the issues of the idler being stuck and the bolt being clogged solved, I was able to get a very beautiful print of Mr Jaws. During that print the second nut on the hobbed bolt came off, and apparently when I put it back on I tightened stuff up a bit too much. This lead to a ton of frustration since it seemed like the extruder was clogged even though I could manually feed filament through the print head. So it is critical that this not be too tight.

Additionally I would say that it is critical to apply locktight to both of the nuts on the Printrbot Wooden Extruder kit. On a longer print of a 40 mm cube for calibration the inside nut actually tightened up sufficiently to cause extrusion issues again. Luckily I was able to identify this and correct it, however it leads me to think that locktight or a single nylock nut should be involved in the situation to prevent this.