Dying Printers and Rebirth

In December 2017, there were printer woes. My trusty Lulzbot Mini 1.03 from October 2015 was having issues. Watching Octopi, I could see it wasn't holding a steady temperature for the hot end.

I attempted just fixing the thermistor, which heats up the aluminum hot end. It was pretty involved - taking the whole printer head apart. Putting it back together, there was a wire feeding into the hotend - I couldn't tell if it was supposed to be covered by heatshrink or not. ZAPPPP!

It caused a short, causing my printer to go a bit crazy. Crashed the head down hard, then *through* the washers. This is where I went completely wrong. One of the z-axis motors was making bad noises, so I tried to adjust all of that. I should have just focused on the short first, then...other things.

The hotend was replaced, to avoid more shorts, and reduce what could be wrong with the machine. The left z-axis motor can work, but it grinds. I did some print jobs as an experiment - the second one caused my x-axis to decant...one side was all the way up, the other side was halfway down.

This leads to the story: when do you leave a hobby behind? Was 3D printing going to be a did-it-for-2-years thing, or a longer project?

Future options as I saw them:

• Retire the hobby
• Buy a new printer
• Another Mini?
• Prusa mk3 (drawback, it uses 1.75mm filament, and I have a lot of 3mm)
• Buy refurbished Mini (1.03 is $750, 1.04 is $1000)
• Buy a craigslist Mini (1.04 with the extra Flexystruder head for $1k total)
• Fix original printer (or buy another from the above options)

I was still learning things. I loved printing. I loved making things. Retiring wasn't something I wanted to embrace. Just designing seemed...boring. There was a risk that if I sit around trying to fix my broken machine, that interest is lost (based on others' experiences). I ended up buying the Craigslist Mini. The guy was okay, he had used it to prototype some cool, flexible iphone cases with a built-in spot for the dongle.

The 1.04 has some nice features. An extra blower fan (nice, but also blocks seeing the nozzle straight on), noise dampeners on ALL of the motors (I had modded my 1.03 to have a dampener on the y-axis), and the filament feeder was much more reliable (probably my only real complaint on the 1.03, and it wasn't that big of a deal).

I have kept working on my 1.03, but the grinding is tough - the next step is to research "squaring" to see if it's my x-axis out of alignment. I was going to replace the z-axis motors, but they are solidly screwed in. More research.

I really enjoy designing and printing, and feel fortunate that it can continue.