Evilmatt's blog

Ode to Skyrim

Ah the elder scrolls games I have been looking forward to it ever since Notch announced it in march of this year ... oh wait wrong scrolls.

Anyway I've played 4 of the 7 Elder scrolls games (though only five of them have numbers the other two were The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard an early 3rd person action game and An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire)

All Change

So quite out of the blue I find myself with a new job.

What happened was the company I currently work for sold off their UK design center (which was originally the company I first joined years and years ago that got bought out a few years back) to another company who make things like SSD’s as part of that I got moved over.

One Year On

It’s been just over a year now since I moved out here to live in California and given the anniversary I figured some time in reflection would be in order.

Back in black

PLA proved a lot of trouble it tended to jam the extruder once to the extent I had to dismantle it. Also getting quality objects out of it was difficult the retained heat proved to be a problem in that objects would stay hot enough to be flexible far longer than with ABS and thus deform while building.

Problematic Plastic

So I had a bash at getting PLA going last night one thing I discovered is the filament storage box (which has a sort of reel + lazy susan connected to a low friction pipe running the filament to the extruder) is not well designed for changing out the reels. I had to unscrew everything and then found most of it wouldn’t go back together with the new reel in.

Incremental Improvements in print quality

So after my bike ride last night I ran up the makerbot and began experimenting with the settings in skeinforge according to some helpful guides someone had put up recently. Skeinforge is a very powerful bit of software that can take an STL model and slice it into layers for the makerbot to build but it’s also something of a enigma in terms of user friendlyness.

A Series of Unplanned Upgrades

I’ve been playing with my makerbot off and on but mainly adding various new bits of hardware to it. When I got the kit I ordered it with the heated build platform but at the time I wasn’t getting good enough prints out of the thing to feel it worth the effort of building and installing the thing.