Monday, July 26, 2021

Bang. Lulzbot Mini stops printing

 I still run two Lulzbot Minis, 1.04. They're durable and dependable.

Except for two weeks ago.

The BANG

I was making some custom Magic the Gathering coasters for a friend's birthday party. The last one to print was the Swamp icon, except...I was down to 1 meter of black filament. I thought I would be clever and do a two-tone. If you haven't read my earlier material, I covered doing it here.

When I switched over from gray to black, it went smoothly. I tried resuming the print from the Octoprint web page - and it choked. The nozzle crashed down onto the printing plate and I aborted. [Note to self: resume it from Cura next time?]

Future prints, it would run into an error during startup.

It would touch the first washer (front left), TRY to touch the second washer (front right) - but fail. At this point it would cancel the job.

Possible solutions:

  1. Nozzle is old and needs replacing - but it was making a connection on the first one
  2. Wire for the bed was broken - apparently the wire can be broken inside its casing
  3. The board was somehow corrupted and needed to be reflashed
  4. Bed was out of alignment - seemed reasonable from the crash
  5. Toolhead was out of alignment - also reasonable from crash
Nozzle is an easy but time-consuming replacement - I'd come back to that if needed.

Replacing the wire was unfamiliar to me, but I would do it if necessary.

Likewise, the brains (the board) - reflashing it is something I had never done.

And then I found this page - adjusting the "x" axis, which is the vertical. (Fixes the toolhead being out of alignment.)


It took some effort to get a good measurement, but it was easy enough to adjust.

Best of all it might even fix my 1.03 that's been sitting in a box for several years. Woo-hoo!

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