busybee fluffy rambles

Oh yeah, today the replacement heat bed sensor cable arrived. It was a major pain in the ass to replace. I ended up routing it differently than the manufacturer intended because the factory routing is clearly what causes the conductors to wear down and fail, and anyway doing it the right way would have required basically disassembling the entire printer.

But anyway I have a working main printer again and so I’ve resumed my production run. The current thing I’m making has TPU parts on it and that filament needs to print slowly so I’m keeping the old printer busy with it (since it’s not like the X1C can make it go any faster anyway). During the downtime I did do a couple of prints of the main PETG part and got a reminder of just how bad the old printer is at printing PETG (slow, lots of stringing, etc.) but it at least let me validate the correctness of the threaded insert.

I also have all of my plaster slip casting equipment and material now, so tomorrow I’ll probably print a calibration cube to make a slip cast mold of (and I guess that would be fun to fire as well). It’ll be fun to have anoter tool for creating things, and it’s nice that slip casting can go entirely in parallel with 3D printing aside from printing the templates.

Oh except I just realized I never bought plasticine, but I can get that at Target. I also still need to get the oil soap as well (which I can also get there).

Anyway, based on how obnoxious it was to fix the X1C, I think if I get a third printer for my print farm it’ll be the A1. It’s just as fast as the P1P and is WAY easier to maintain. The downside is that being a bed-slinger it’s still prone to some of the more annoying print defects inherent to that (especially ring artifacts). Also its AMS takes up a hell of a lot of desk space, but I wasn’t planning on getting a second AMS anyway. I mostly use my X1C’s as a fancy dry box, and there’s much cheaper dry boxes out there. It does mean that my multimaterial prints can only happen on the X1C, though, unless I go through the hassle of getting the Palette working again.