Monthly maintenance

So, after just over a month more of continuous use of my Mendel, I noticed the filament not spanning gaps well. It had also gone curly again. I measured it at about 0.6mm extruded into fresh air, so decided it was time to bore out the nozzle again. I do this with a 0.5mm bit held between my fingers with the nozzle hot. This restored the diameter to over 0.7mm again, so it is able to extrude 0.6mm filament with enough stretch to span gaps. Looks like this needs to be once a month maintenance.

Another failure I had was two of the bed support lugs sheared off the 360 y-bearings: -

 

These are under more load on my machine because I have a heavy metal bed. They also get some strain when parts are being removed from it. Rather than strip the machine down and replace the y-bearings, I made a new part that sits between the two y-bearings and supports the bed on three rather than four points.

 

If the bed is slightly flexible, for example when made from Dibond, then all four corners can be levelled independently. When it is stiffer, for example 6mm aluminium, then you can only adjust three points independently. In fact, one of those can be fixed and then there are only two points that need adjusting.

I made this using the support material option of Skienforge for the first time. To use it I have to enable the raft module but then disable the raft by setting the base layers and interface layers to zero. Without the cross hatch option the support material is easier to remove, but it tends to come away from the bed. For raft-less support the first layer of the support could do with being solid.

Other persistent problems I have are connectors losing contact, so reseating them once a month is good idea. The constant vibration and heat cycling seems to make connectors unreliable. Screw terminals with ferrules over the wire end seems to be the way to go.

The M8 nuts on the frame shake loose, I wish I had used lock washers! Also the grub screw in the pulleys eventually work loose after months and the one in the extruder drive gear needs tightening after a few weeks. It seems to be impossible to keep anything tight in plastic, especially when it is oscillating backwards and forwards. The plastic gives a little and that movement causes screws to work loose. Perhaps some thread-lock in the set screws would do the trick, but I am not certain that the screw might need to be tightened to take up slack caused by the plastic creeping.

Of course running a machine 24/7 is not what most users will do, so it will take many months of normal use before these types of fault manifest.

Rebore

My Mendel has been very reliable and consistent running virtually 24/7, but about a week ago, after putting on a new reel of plastic things started to go wrong. The initial symptoms were that small parts built fine, in fact I printed a mini Mendel or Huxley that came out well: -

It took just two full Mendel beds, plus a few parts on HydraRaptor. I did the gears on Hydra for accuracy and the Bowden clamps at 100% fill because they look weak to me for the job they are intended to do. The plastic weighs 335g (including a Wade's extruder), slightly more than 1/3 of a Mendel by weight but the print time is about 1/2, because small parts need finer filament. I printed most of these at 0.5mm whereas I do a lot of Mendel at 0.6mm.

But getting back to the problem, the quality of large parts had started to fall off a bit. They were coming out with blobs on the outside formed by the nozzle oozing as it moves from one object to another. These were not well bonded, so they could be simply scraped off with a fingernail, but something I had tuned out ages ago. Another change was that it was not doing 45 degree overhangs well, so it left filament hanging down in the tops of tear shaped holes. Again, not a big problem as they just get drilled out anyway.

I started to suspect the temperature was too high so I pushed the thermistor well into the heater block. Then the filament started jamming after the first layer (which I do very slowly). After a few attempts the extruder drive gear broke where the captive nut for the grub screw is. This seemed more like the temperature was too low, so I suspected the thermistor was no longer reliable. I decided to rebuild the heater assembly as my last one was put together in a hurry from parts left over from an experiment. It had been in the wars as well, being entombed in ABS and hacked out again, not to mention running almost continuously for about 2500 hours. Originally the thermistor was glued in with RTV silicone, but that was long gone and it relied on the wires holding it in place.

Since my original heater hack using a vitreous enamel resistor I had moved on to a smaller resistor on Hydra and found that worked better. The surface area of the block is a lot less and that is where most of the heat is lost from, so the amount of power required goes down. It also warms up faster of course, both due to less heat being lost and also less thermal mass. The resistor I have settled on is a Vishay / Sfernice RWM04106R80JR15E1

The thermistor is drilled as close as I dare to the thread for the nozzle and then counter-bored so that the entrance is wide enough for the PTFE sleeving. The wires have PTFE insulation to withstand the temperature and the resistor is soldered with 300°C HMP solder. I think I could also get away with ordinary unleaded solder as well because of the length of the resistor leads, but I didn't want to chance it.

After a tip from Giles I used Rothenberger high temperature glass rope adhesive to glue the resistor and the thermistor. It sets in only half an hour, which is a big advantage over other things I have tried. I also used it to stick ceramic tape on the outside of the block to insulate it.

When I first heated it up the adhesive bubbled causing a downward slope in the temperature graph. I thought at first the thermistor had been dislodged by the blistering, but I think it was just temporarily cooled by the out-gassing. I should have heated it much more slowly the first time I think.

The new heater works much better than the old one. The warm up time to 255°C is about 280 seconds, whereas the old one took about 400 seconds (the bed takes about 350 seconds to get to 140°C). It also runs at about 70% to maintain 240°C while extruding, whereas the old one needed about 90%. The bang-bang control cycles much faster and only deviates by one degree. That is because of the close proximity of the thermistor to the heater. Because it is mounted between the heater and the barrel I can be sure the swing at the barrel is even less. I calibrate against a thermocouple inside the barrel, so any temperature difference across the block is calibrated out. It should be negligible though because the thermistor is also very close to the barrel and aluminium is a very good conductor. The extra power needed to heat the ABS when extruding 0.6mm filament at 32mm/s is about 10%, i.e. ~2W.

The new improved heater didn't solve any of my problems though. While reassembling the extruder I tried pushing filament through by hand. It was much harder than I remembered it was when I first built the extruder. At this point I was beginning to suspect the plastic was different in some way although it looked identical and was part of the same purchase.

I noted that the filament was coming out very curly. That was something I had noticed happening on both my machines when I do a test extrusion, but I had ignored it. I measured the diameter though and found whereas it normally swells to 0.7mm this was coming out oval and about 0.5mm by 0.6mm. It all fell into place then. I have read that the difference between straight hair and curly hair is whether it is round or oval. The only way the filament could be oval is if the nozzle aperture is no longer round. I put a 0.5mm drill bit through it and it started to extrude round, straight, 0.7mm filament again. The hole must have been partially occluded by the burnt plastic that tends to glaze the end of the nozzle. That caused the plastic to come out thinner and faster. It was fine when making objects with 0.5mm filament because it was still being stretched but when building with 0.6mm filament it was being compressed, so would hang loose if given the chance. The smaller hole increased the barrel pressure, which is why it oozed. The plastic would be compressed more, so require more backing up to release the pressure and stop the flow. Also the extra pressure was too much for the pinch wheel when extruding at the top flow rate I use, which is 0.6mm at 32mm/s. I think the M8 hobbed bolt is below the ideal diameter for softer plastic like ABS.

I also re-bored HydraRaptor (with a 0.4mm drill) and that stopped the filament being curly as well. It seems nozzles need occasionally re-boring. I had assumed that the hot flow of high pressure plastic would have kept the hole clean, but not so.

So a simple fault had my machine out of action for days because I didn't recognise what the symptoms meant collectively.

Some corners like it hot

Large objects with sharp corners, such as the Mendel z-leadscrew-base, produce enough stress to form a blister in the PET tape on my heated bed. These can only be flattened again by pricking the tape. I can't understand how air gets in and cannot get out again, but that is what seems to happen.

The blisters leave a small indentation in the object's base. It is only an aesthetic problem because the base remains flat, i.e. it doesn't rock on a flat surface.

Sometimes the blister allows the corner to peel from the bed towards the end of a build, allowing the corner to curl upwards a little. Generally I can avoid that by cleaning the bed with acetone before problem builds. I also use hexagonal infill on those parts and only two solid layers rather than three in an attempt to reduce the stress. When I design my own parts I round the corners, where possible, to prevent such problems.

A solution may be to use a sheet of PET rather than PET tape, but then you need to find a way of holding it down. One thing I have noticed though is that when I build a bed with four of the z-brackets closely packed the corners on the inside don't blister or lift. That must be because the air around them is hotter. As an experiment I added some little plastic walls to the build to act as baffles to keep the heat in as the bed moves through cooler air.

These have a 5mm thick base to help keep the tape flat and are 1mm away from the edge of the object. They work well and stop the blisters forming at the corners. They are very similar to Forrest's apron technique but their primary function is thermal rather than mechanical. A more general technique would be to build a thin wall all the way around the perimeter of the objects to cocoon them. I expect that would only need to be one filament thick and perhaps might give a similar effect to having a heated build chamber.

Freezing your bits off

Since I started cleaning my PET tape with acetone it can be hard to remove the parts from it sometimes. Somebody suggested trying freezer spray a while back, so I gave it a go.

I got this Arctic Spray, which is intended for freezing water pipes so that you can work on them without draining the water. I must admit I wouldn't fancy having a strict time limit if I was plumbing, you would have to be sure you had all the right tools and materials to start with. My occasional forays into plumbing rarely go to plan and usually involve a trip to B & Q in the middle.

I tried it first on an ABS part before the bed had cooled for any length of time, so it would be at about 100°C and the parts still soft. The part curled up at the edges and so came off easily. I thought I had ruined it by making it warp, but to my surprise it became flat again when it cooled. Still that seems a bit risky, and the spray isn't cheap, so now I cool the bed to 50°C with a fan and then spray any stubborn parts that I can't pull off. It works a treat but I don't know how long a can will last. It would have to be a lot of uses to make it worth the cost: £4.49 plus £2.20 on eBay. Hitting them with a block of wood and a hammer is a lot cheaper!

Friday the 13th

When I got up last Friday morning my PC had this on the screen: -

This is despite the fact that I had automatic updates set to ask me before installing. This was the result :-

The PC had stopped talking to my Mendel about half way through a seven hour build, so the axes had stopped moving but the extruder was left running for a few hours. The result was that the extruder was encased in a solid ball of ABS about the size of a tangerine. Thanks Microsoft! What I actually said at the time was less polite!

Of course I was planning to put some safeguards in the firmware and also run the machine from an SD card, but have never quite got round to it as I have been printing virtually non-stop for months.

I couldn't remove the extruder from the carriage because the blob was too big to go through the gap, so I had to dismantle the x-axis to release the carriage.

I have seen this happen to other people and it wrote off the extruder, but I thought this one should survive because it is mostly metal underneath the blob.

I tried using a loop of hot nichrome to slice bits of it off. The nichrome cut through OK, but the ABS closed up behind it, so it achieved nothing.

Next I tried a small circular saw attached to a Dremel. That worked OK, but threw off sawdust and bits of ABS hot enough to burn, even through light clothing. I got the bulk of it off that way but when I nicked one of the heater wires I decided to stop.

I got some more off by heating it with a hot air gun and pulling lumps off with a pair of pliers. That was OK but the whole extruder got too hot to hold and it was starting to soften the carriage.

I got the remainder off by running the heater up to 200°C and using a knife, wire cutters and pliers. It took me about 3 evenings in total to remove the blob and the machine was out of action for a week while I reassembled it and calibrated it again.

It now takes a bit longer to warm up, and extrudes more filament during the warm up process than it used to. I suspect therefore that the thermistor is reading low and so it is running hotter. It doesn't seem to cause a problem with the ABS that I am using. I had to increase the time I run the extruder to prime it after warm up though.

I also seem to have managed to bend one of my z lead-screws while sliding the x-axis bars in and out. It doesn't matter as the axis is constrained by the z-bars, but annoying as it rattles a bit.

All in all a bit of a disaster. It's running again now though, but I still haven't put a safeguard in my firmware. I will have to develop it on HydraRaptor and load it into Mendel between builds. I have disabled automatic updates!

Rejuvenated Bed

I put new PET tape on my heated bed at the beginning of July. Since then I have printed 15 Mendels on it, but on the last few I was getting problems with the parts not sticking. That is after about 700 hours of printing and ~15kg of plastic. I occasionally swab it down with Isopropanol to remove grease from finger prints, but Isopropanol is not a solvent for ABS. This evening I tried cleaning it with acetone instead. It dramatically increased the grip level, restoring it to new and making the parts hard to remove again! ABS must leave some traces behind on the surface of the bed and the acetone removes it.

So it looks like PET tape is almost fully reusable. It tends to get the odd blister where the corners of big objects overcome its adhesive and picks up a few scars from the odd accident with a knife. Apart from that it just needs cleaning with acetone about once a month.