After several months of not printing I finally have a working 3D printer again - Yay! I can only blame myself for this; since I in my eagerness to improve the printer tore it apart before printing the new parts I needed. Even though my J-Head arrived swiftly I had nothing to mount it on...
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| J-Head Mk V-BV. Excellent build quality! |
The aluminum plate mounted on top of the slide-bearings did not have enough stability using zip ties alone. I tried replacing the zip ties with brass wire (the sort used to hang paintings with), but that turned out even worse since you can't get the wire tight enough.
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| My best friend Sugru at work again. |
Enter
Sugru. I had a batch in the fridge that was nearing it's use-by date so why not try that. I made sure to protect the bearings with scotch tape so the sugru wouldn't stick - only support. Apply healthy amount of sugru and wait 24 hours. Worked like a charm!
Next I needed a new mechanism to feed the plastic. The easiest would have been to print something, but without a working printer that proved ... difficult.
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| Initial setup with the spring mechanism. |
After a lot of thought and a fair number of iterations I came up with a design that let me have a spring as tension mechanism on the filament feeder.
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| Need more springs Scotty! |
When calibrating the feed rate I quickly discovered that the original spring didn't have nearly enough force to keep the flow of plastic consistent - especially when the filament spool needed to be unreeled by the printer as well. Adding three more springs fixed that issue neatly - although it doesn't look as pretty any more.
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| First print: new tension lever. |
As for now the feeder seems to hold up pretty good as well as consistent results. I think I'll keep it for a while. The J-Head I'm really impressed with; great build quality and excellent print result!
