I had some fun printing today as you can hopefully tell. I printed a shot glass to carry on the tradition from the early days and filled it with delicious Oban single malt just because sweet heathery nectar lusciously melting into my tongue is deeply and richly satisfying. The first print of the day went awry when the half-printed glass came unstuck from the heatbed and started dancing around coreographed by the still extruding hot end. I had a premature celebration anyway once I'd scraped off the spaghetti and vowed to do the next one with hair dryer in hand. The results are on show below    /                                                                                                                  V

Slangy va!

So you all saw how dodgy my first print was. No integrity in the object walls - it was supposed to be a little shot glass (traditionally the first thing printed) but no-one could have drunk from it, not even Hobbits. I have fiddled a little and got the heatbed actually heating up - it makes a big difference!

Just looking at that bed makes me heat up.

There is still some tinkering to do with settings in Slic3r before I actually get prints being exactly the way I want them but the progress is clear for all to see:

And from this I was able to garner a lovely chunk that I made into a ring for my lovely wife. I'm posing in it here as I wait on my next print - what should have been a whistle.

Is that a plaster you're wearing?

As it turned out the Slic3r settings I referred to above were quite a way off and although lovely and smooth, it would have just been a big fat solid whistle shape, rather than something you blow to make a noise... print cancelled, maybe it'll make a nice earring? Perhaps I'll be wearing it the next time you see me. 

So then I went ahead and tried to print a nice fat shot glass for the Burns night I'm putting on on Saturday, before realising that it too would not work. It was being printed upside down, meaning the last layers would be laid down in the middle of a nice fat tube onto nothing but thin air. I didn't think the interesting yet ultimately pointless print was worth continuing so I decided to stop printing. To my dismay printing had already stopped and the extruder was hovering a few layers above what had already been printed and was extruding nothing but thin air. 

Might make a nice bracelet for the baby... 

After taking the whole hot end apart and putting it back together again, having blowtorched the blockage out (sadly I can't film these things whilst doing them at the same time) I started another print and within a minute or so it was clear the extruder was blocked again. Seems like a perfect opportunity to take it apart again, this time filming the blowtorching, and giving the damn thing an acetone bath. Might also order another couple of brass nozzles just to screw in when this sort of thing happens again. Blowtorching or acid baths seems like the kind of thing I can do whilst letting the printer print something else.

My poor old still-half-clogged extruder. Awww.

                                      

So here is an actual object that I printed out myself! Hahaha, it feels good to say that!

Here are some pics of what it turned out like, its not perfect but the general level of non-deformation is pretty good I think. The next object will be bigger so there's more room for error. With any luck it will actually be possible to drink a shot from that one. I just so happen to know a bottle of Lagavulin that has been waiting 16 years for this opportunity...

First layer fail!

My flatmate Pedro, almost as chuffed as I was.

So the next failed print wasn't quite such a big fail as the last one, you can nicely see the lattice where a tiny wee corner of nonstickiness resulted in serious deformation of the rest of the print.

This was after I cleaned the heatbed with manpolish remover (98% alcohol) that the local furniture aficionado at the corner of my street (Herman Sachse himself) assured me is of highest quality and is used by a local chip manufacturer and some Biolab. Better than the wife's nailpolish remover - she deliberately bought acetone free stuff which has some linseed oil or some kind of pollutant in it.

These are the pretty little plastic blobs from my failed prints thus far. I'm pretty proud of them to be honest, its nice to have transformed the filament into something abstract, something organic, something worthy of the process. I hope you like them too!

Here was the first time I got all the axes functioning together at the same time. You can see the wires are a little restrictive and both X and  Y judder a wee bit. Lots of tinkering around later, and:

I thought I'd actually print something, but unfortunately the heatbed isn't warming up and this means the PLA doesn't stick right. Next time I'll heat it up manually with a hair dryer. After I clean it with cheap nail varnish remover, and maybe spray it with hairspray. No wonder my wife is teasing me that I have a make-up space and not a makerspace.... my new look will be arriving here soon!

Some seminal footage of my ceiling in all its glory. Notice the precise craftsmanship of the plasterwork - 'Stuck' (like "shh"and then "duck" in a north-english accent.) The tools on the wall are also to be carefully admired. Enjoy the Y.

The first of the day always tastes better when you've achieved something. Today was a good day.