Our experiences

The printer is finished now and we spend most of our time printing stuff. The process has not been without complications though, and we still have some trouble. But it's a long story so let's start from the beginning.


The building phase was quite simple and the instructions were generally good. A few places the manual had some mistakes that we had to work around, and here the 3D manual came to our rescue. Our first major problem was when I cut the nichrome wire in two pieces, when it should have been one! Apparently the kit can come with two different kinds of nichrome wire, an uninsulated and an insulated variety, and the manual contains different sections for each kind of wire, which I wasn't aware of. So I happily started out following the section for the uninsulated wire (we have the insulated one) which ended in two unusable pieces of wire. Luckily the good people at Labitat came to our rescue and supplied us with some nichrome wire. It was a bit thinner than the original, and the resistance was higher, so go get the same resistance as the original piece, we had to cut it to a third of the length. It ended up being 21cm and 4.2 ohm and it works perfectly.


Our second challenge was the hot end and especially the fire cement. The sample we got was very dry and nearly impossible to mold around the nichrome wire and thermistor. We added a tiny amount of water (one or two drops) which made it a bit easier, but the result is still not pretty, albeit functional.

Beside these challenges, the build went fine, but the extruder and hot end part took a lot more time than we expected.


When we started printing with our PLA from Orbitech, it suddenly got stuck. After some tinkering and disassembly of the extruder, we found the reason. We were trying to find the right temperature for our PLA and had left the heater on for too long without running the extruder. This means that heat crawled up the hot end and made the filament soft, so when we turned on the extruder, the filament was just compressed inside the extruder instead of being pushed out. So, the lesson to be learned is: Don't let the heater run at high temperatures without also running the extruder.


We have also printed replacement parts for all the corners, which introduced a whole new slew of problems, but more about that later.