It's been six weeks since we've had an update. My broken leg certainly has impeded my progress. I was finally able to take my printer into the Gainesville Hackerspace and got some help from Kamin. I got there early and had just hooked it all up when he arrived.
We got right to work and there were times I had to swallow my pride, and other times where my swallowed pride was able to feel a bit vindicated. We re-calibrated. We diagnosed. We, and by we, I mean Kamin. The issue has been clogged nozzles, which impeded the flow of the filament. After playing with a sacrificial filament, Kamin decided we needed to pull the heater block apart. It was there we found the problem: the tube which guides the bourdon tube to the nozzle did not fit flush with the nozzle. This allowed the filament to ooze into the block and goop up the works. We tightened the tube with a 10mm wrench (pliers are discouraged around my gear), re-intalled the nozzle and checked it. It seemed to be poifect. We also upped the temp a bit and printed the cube on the SD card Tevo provided. WOW!!! The "after" cube is on the left and it looks great!
My injury swelled up last night to alarming proportions, so I took it rather easy today. I moved the printer in just before noon and set it. On Kamin's recommendation, I changed the bed gap from o.003" to o.005" (to eliminate elephant foot), upped the temp on Cura to 230C and made sure printing height was kept to o.1mm. That's making for long print times, but the results are awe-awe-awesome.
So, I printed the 20mm XYZ cube and I was only %2 off and it looked as good. Notice that there is no elephant foot. Damn, this is cool!
So now it's time to print something actually useful. I designed a signature battery box with NetDoc on the cover. The CAD I used did not allow me to design it upside down, so I made the Rookie mistake and set it to print that way and no, I didn't include supports. I'm sure it will fail, but I want to see it happen. OK, it failed!
OK, I'm about to do a blog with Scuba Radio, I cancelled the print and I think I'm going to print the battery holder for my dive lights first. It's only a 14 hour print, so I'll see it tomorrow morning. But the printer is noisy, so I'll keep it off until I done with Greg. Good stuff though. I'm pumped.