This will mark the 3rd time I’ve had to replace the ceramic tape on my extruder heads, and it was just as painful as the first two times. But hopefully this time it’ll be the last. Because this time I’ve used high temp tape. My theory is that the reason my tape keeps failing is because when a print fails …
So it turns out my Makerbot is just fine. Remember that build platform upgrade I did a few weeks back? The removable glass platforms that BottleWorks made are longer on one side, I have no idea why, because the only thing that happens with that is if you put it on wrong it blocks the Y-gantry, which is what I …
When I can finally afford to replace this Makerbot, either because 3D printers have gotten cheap or I’ve become independently wealthy, I hope that the machines that replace them will be slightly more reliable. But that’s not what I have. What I have is a few days of printing between problems. At least it feels that way right now. A …
This is by far the most annoying bit of maintenance that the Makerbot needs. The ceramic tape is held on only by Kapton and frequently exposed to plastic from failed prints, which is what broke the right extruder’s insulation this time. The left one also has problems in that the ceramic tape has broken down, turned brittle, and is flaking …
It’s time to fix the ceramic tape. No patch job this time. There is embarrassingly little written up on how to do this properly. The best I could find was a PDF on how to assemble the Mk7. In the end I managed but I made a lot of mistakes along the way. And sometimes the point of a tutorial is so …
Sometimes finding what’s wrong with the makerbot is just a matter of knowing where to look. In this case the problem was between the keyboard and the chair. This is not a good thing to see. Especially when it’s just a little print. It was filling up the whole print bed, tearing the Kapton tape off, and clicking at the …
