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. I tried the cool plug in for skeinforge but this made things even worse as it orbits the object for a while to let it cool this had the effect of wrapping the object in trailing filament fibres from the extruder twisting the object as it did it.
So I cleaned out the extruder and switched to the reel of black ABS. ABS had some trouble sticking to the Automated Build Platform so I also swapped back to the heated build platform which has a nice smooth Kapton base that the ABS will stick to nicely.
So it was back to getting good print quality again and I spent some time printing out more cubes to get the settings right. It took about 16 goes to get something almost right. I eventually printed a pretty decent dodecahedron. One problem I discovered is that in the newest version of Skeinforge the fill pattern now runs parallel to the raft making it hard to remove once the object has cooled previously the fill pattern was diagonal so detaching the raft was a bit easier.
Now with the printer going and pretty close to fine tuned I’ll probably print a few more test objects then look at some printer upgrades.
In Bike riding I’ve been going over the same distance trying to improve my time a bit. Weather conditions have been getting worse it’s a lot colder and raining but once your going you don’t really notice it so much. In my constant battle with darkness I got hold of one of those head torches this was a 3 watt led one with a nice rechargeable battery. Mounted to my cycle helmet it works pretty well like a headlight. All my other lights can now be set to flashing don’t run me over warning lights.
