Repairs

Finding space to work can be a little difficult in the small apartment. In my never ending quest to have desk space I did some rearranging. Unfortunately the printer was damaged in the shuffle and required some repairs.

This connector supplies power to the heated bed, or did before it was unintentionally removed.

The connector on the heated bed had been a problem for a while, the stock configuration actually caused some scorching and melting. I had made due by routing current through MOSFETs, using some more robust cabling, and utilizing available unused connectors. While these modifications served admirably for nearly 2 years, I had stocked up on replacements for this eventuality.

Having the parts on hand was great, I wrote a nice thank you card to my past self for looking out for us. In addition having recently done the calibration to set things up meant all my tools were readily available. I took measurements of the previous heated bed height and swapped in the new one. With heights matched to +/-0.2mm of previous settings I was ready to move to calibration.

MX style key caps, a batch of 25 for calibration.

To calibrate I prepared a batch of 25 MX style key caps. This picture was taken just after the first layer was completed. As you can see the caps on the left appear in solid white while you can practically see through the ones on the right. This meant I needed a slight adjustment to lower the height on the right side.
Adjustments made, I moved on to a real test.

For the test I decided to make some new feet for my PC case. The stock case has ground clearance of about 8mm, I was curious to see if lifting the case would improve airflow in a meaningful way.

The custom designed replacement feet pop into place the same as the stock ones, but offer a ground clearance of 20mm. I ran a battery of benchmarks all showing negligible difference between the two configurations. While I did not get any significant change in average temperature or compute metrics I have opted to stick with the custom configuration mostly for headphone cable routing.
Printer: REPAIRED

Curiosity about airflow: SATED

Minor annoyance with headphone cable: still minor but more minor now than before

SUCCESS!!!

Zachary KilboyFebruary 22, 2020