Untitled - Musings on 3D Printing

In our past weeks working on this project, we made a lot of progress in building our ender printer to the point it can functionally print objects. The last problem we had to deal with was levelling the bed of the printer because even though are printer was functionally, if we printed with an uneven bed the printer would assume the it is printing over an even surface; the problem with that is that the hot end would end up problematically emitting filament and not actually give the desired shape. After we successfully assembled our printer, the problem we found was that the filament spool was not staying in place. The problem with this is that we found several times that when we carried our printer to our table and back, the filament wheel fell off several times. After brief research, we found an additional part online which we could print to solve this problem.

As a replacement to our spool holder, we resorted to printing a new one that would be placed at the side of the printer at the bottom. We placed it at an angle so that it wouldn’t fall off as easily. This way, the spool would not fall off as easily. A problem we may still have is that it can still fall off every once in a while but it’s much more secure. To fix this we could print a circular part that would attach to the cylinder so that the spool would definitely not fall off. We’re going to keep seeing if the spool does not fall off. If it doesn’t fall off, then we won’t add the circular piece.

We used many printer settings during this process; as we mentioned before, we spent much time working on leveling the bed of our printer. In that part of our process, we constantly had to use the “disable stepper” and “origin” options to help us do the paper test with our printers. At this point, we have to worry about properly installing our new spool holder..