Mechanically Inclined

Baby steps must come before awesome big boy steps and today I took my first of most likely many. The quality of the parts are very poor which due to a mixture of poor calibration of the machine and an extruder that doesn’t work particularly well (due to a lamely implemented hack to the extruder in order to get it to work)

My first attempt was on a button stylized as an owl. As you can see from the pictures it is a very sad owl, and really a very sad button. The height the system raised the extrusion head for each layer was set too low so it smeared everything around.

The second attempt was on what is called the minimug. It is the standard RepRap test part and is intended to be used to toast your machine with an object that it printed. My glass wont be holding any liquids but it is heartening to see something that resembles an object!

I will be machining a proper gear driven extruder in the coming week and tweaking the settings of the machine to achieve highest possible print quality. Together those changes should give me much higher print quality. It will be interesting to see how it turns out!