Problems in Pink

That could have gone better…

Peter is still working on his 3D printer. Today I had a go at printing another part for him. It did not end well. As you can see above, when the printer runs out of fibre to print, bad things happen.

I’ve mostly reached the point where failed prints are not as interesting as they used to be, but even so I’m tempted to hang on to this one. The problem came because I’m coming to the end of my lovely pink/magenta fibre and the last few metres are tightly wound around the inside of the spool. When they are fed into the printer the tight curves of the fibre cause more friction in the tube that pushes them into the print head. This gets harder to push, so the knurled bolt that is doing the pushing starts to slip against the fibre, eventually wearing it in two.

Then you get to strip down the feeder and extract the broken bit. Fortunately the print head wasn’t blocked, and so I was able to switch to red fibre (that little coil that looks like red hose is me forcing out the pink and sending in the red) and print all the bits with no problems.

I’m going to have to make something that straightens the pink fibre out so that I can use it.