lol, Things were going so well… It was too good to be true.
After a rather trouble free introduction into the world of 3D printing, I ended up running into a brick wall of sorts. I came up with a list of things I wanted to print, and carved out some time on the weekend to get things up and running. The first item on my print list was a Raspberry Pi case. I set the printer up and kicked the print off and immediately noticed there was a problem. The initial lines that the printer was laying down failed to stick to the print bed, and as the printer head moved around they would catch on the head and soon formed a messy pile of printed filament.
In the spirit of keeping this post short (I have a tendency to ramble). I initially thought the culprit was humidity (specifically, PLA has a tendency to absorb water over time). I tested this theory by pulling out the small roll of sample filament and attempted to print a bike tool. Didn’t work. I then ordered some glue sticks as that solution was mentioned a number of times on internet forums. Didn’t work. I sat on it for a week, digging around the various corners of the internet for a possible solution. Finally, I decided to go back to the basics. I pulled off the painter’s tape and replaced it with a fresh strip. I re-leveled the bed, this time being extra careful on each corner (turns out the bed was quite high), and then kicked off a print. And viola… It worked.
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First attempt at the pi case, definitely not working.
Still not sure if it was the painter’s tape or the bed leveling that fixed it. If this issue pops up again I will try and test out both. Anyways, stoked to have the printer up and running again. I am going to set it up in a tucked away corner of the apartment so that I don’t have to move it around every time I want to use it (I think that creates issues with the bed leveling). I am also working on setting the printer up with Octoprint (using a Raspberry PI, which I now have a pretty cool case for) because the printer will be harder to access in it’s new location. Cheers.
EDIT: Forgot to mention that during all of this I also encountered my first printer head jam. It was most likely caused by some ‘rouge filament’ that got trapped in the head when I was swapping between the sample filament and my normal roll. Here is a good youtube video that covers how to deal with these issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgsq297zdAs