PLA proved a lot of trouble it tended to jam the extruder once to the extent I had to dismantle it. Also getting quality objects out of it was difficult the retained heat proved to be a problem in that objects would stay hot enough to be flexible far longer than with ABS and thus deform while building.
So I had a bash at getting PLA going last night one thing I discovered is the filament storage box (which has a sort of reel + lazy susan connected to a low friction pipe running the filament to the extruder) is not well designed for changing out the reels. I had to unscrew everything and then found most of it wouldn’t go back together with the new reel in.
So after my bike ride last night I ran up the makerbot and began experimenting with the settings in skeinforge according to some helpful guides someone had put up recently. Skeinforge is a very powerful bit of software that can take an STL model and slice it into layers for the makerbot to build but it’s also something of a enigma in terms of user friendlyness.
I’ve been playing with my makerbot off and on but mainly adding various new bits of hardware to it. When I got the kit I ordered it with the heated build platform but at the time I wasn’t getting good enough prints out of the thing to feel it worth the effort of building and installing the thing.
I’ve been getting into the cycling of late. After a rough start where I had my bike nicked after only a couple of weeks of owning it and then the requisit wait to see if anyone would return the thing I got another identical model from the shop.
I spent this weekend playing two games and fiddling with my makerbot trying to get reliable prints out of it.
An update on various things that have been going on.
Holiday in Tahoe and SF:
I woke fairly late on day three something like 10am. The sunday is probably the wind down day of PAX there were few events I wanted to look into and I planned to spend the day on the convention floor.
I woke up early then slept in till 9 checking the Twitter feed there was still space at the main hall so I headed over. I joined the queue and waited and after a few hours got into the place for the PA make a strip panel.
I flew down on the Thursday the flight was packed and probably had more than its fair share of PAX goers.
Got into Seattle late and took the light rail into town which worked quite well. The hotel was nice pretty fancy I had some food and crashed.