Tag Archives: filament

A bargain

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The cheapest commercially available 3d printer on the market is the Dimension uPrint Personal 3D Printer, clocking in at $14,900.  The media cartridges run $250 – and consist of coiled ABS in a plastic box.  I can’t tell from their website how much plastic is in each cartridge, so I don’t know how cost effective it is.  I’m not positive exactly how their cartridges operate – but I would not be surprised if they were tamper resistant, not able to be refilled, and contained special chips which authenticated them as being untampered and coming direct from the manufacturer.

Am I jaded by inkjets?  Probably.  I’m tired of buying printers with 1/3 full cartridges and expensive refills.  The warranties are so much worse:

“Expensive manufacturer refills only!  Only use paper made from unicorn tears and the hopes and dreams of orphans!  Only power your machine with live baby seals.  Using reasonably priced alternative supplies, making disparaging remarks, failure to properly maintain your machine, or printing will destroy your machine and void your warranty.”

My MakerBot came with more plastic than I can print in two years runs just barely over $1,000 with shipping.  If something were to happen to MakerBot Industries, I can always find new filament elsewhere, adapt my ‘bot to a new source, or even a new material entirely.  Or, I could just toss in a Dremel and have a mini-CNC/drill press.

Backing out the filament

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I’ve found that backing out the filament after each print, while a pain, has been helpful in avoiding extruder jams.  Or, rather, I have found fewer extruder jams while doing this. 1

I suspect the reason this has helped is that it removes from the PTFE insulator any of the remaining plastic that might have been about to ooze near the barrel top.  Have you found that this helps you?

  1. Not to confuse coincidence, correlation and causation, but I have also found fewer extruder jams when wearing my underwear inside out… [↩]

PLA Woes

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My adventure with PLA has ended in heartbreak.  It wasn’t working very well so I switched back to ABS – which was fine for a few prints.  Until I found it just wasn’t extruding and stripping the filament.

So, disassemble time.  My filament looked like it was getting shoved into a jam and splitting apart like a banana – with the center making it down to the nozzle through a small aperture.  I found I couldn’t remove the insulator – and upon looking closer found that a very small amount of PLA had oozed down and around the nut above the insulator/ washer.  I removed the extruder assembly from the ‘bot, and the heater assembly from the extruder, heated it back up and slowly removed the PTFE insulator.  I found the barrel was clogged with ABS as was the insulator.

I’ve managed to clean out most of the insulator, the nut, and the threads of the barrel using drill bits and precision screwdrivers.

I’m going back to ABS, I would rather deal with warp than the heartbreak of PLA ooze into the threads of my heater assembly.