Month: March 2017

Had to return my “new” printer today…

After days of research, I finally pulled the trigger and purchased my first 3D printer; Monoprice’s Maker Select V2 through Amazon. I was following the instructions step by step when I came upon a small red flag. The instructions said to carefully remove the zip tie that prevented the extruder assembly from traversing the x-axis rods during shipping, but that zip tie was no where to be found. I overlooked the small error in packaging and carried on. A couple of steps down the road, I flipped the power supply on and was about to set the printer for calibration when I switched over to the screen where it shows the collective print time and filament printed. I was shocked at what I saw: 21 days of print time and over 2500 meters of filament printed. I wouldn’t have been too surprised if it said a couple hours at most if per say Monoprice test prints each printer they sell (which I’m pretty sure they don’t do, right?) but that, along with the missing zip tie, made me think that this printer wasn’t new at all. For no charge, I sent it back to amazon today for an exchange and I’m hoping that I don’t have the same problem. I tried searching through the sub to see if anyone had this problem but I couldn’t find anything. I was a little disappointed, but I’m hoping that the problem will be fixed with a “newer” printer. http://ift.tt/2nV4NXm

I tested some GT2 belts to failure on a tensile test machine.

Bit of a random post, but I had some spare belt left over and access to a giant tensile test machine (the kind used to pull part pieces of steel) and so thought I’d test the belt pieces to see the difference between the cheap belt I bought from ebay and the belts that came with my Anet A8. The belt from ebay was something like £1.50 a meter so not an expensive buy!First up the belts look and feel different. The anet belt was thicker and glossy plastic whereas the ebay belt was matte and somewhat thinner. The both however had the same pitch.The belts also failed in different ways too. The anet belt simply stretched and pulled apart, whereas the ebay belt snapped completly.Anyway here’s a graph.The anet belt takes much less force to stretch. The graph suggests that when tensioning the belt the anet belt will stretch much more significantly than the ebay belt and so my takeaway from this is that the anet belt is not as good and should be replaced with something better. http://ift.tt/2o76bUc