Skip to main content

My Solidoodle 4: One year later

I've had the printer a full year now, and I would say that I've printed at least couple hundred things.  I've downloaded things from Thingiverse, designed my own parts and prototypes, and overall gotten tons of good use out of this machine.  Here it is printing a battery case for my Hubsan X4 quadcopter right now:


My only complaints are: 

  1. The Y axis, which consists of a bar on either side of the machine, is a real pain to keep from binding up (and before you ask, yes I've done all the procedures to equalize tension, align, lubricate, etc.). When it binds up, I get infill gaps.  I run through aforementioned procedures and it's good for a few prints until I start getting infill gaps again. 
  2. The X axis carriage seems to have an some kind of uneven incline, causing prints not to stick as well to the mid-left side of the build platform.  The adjustments on the build platform don't help because the incline is uneven, thus the issue is only over a small part of the platform, away from the edge.  I haven't found any procedures to address this. My only guess is that I need to replace the horizontal aluminum rods, as they must have somehow gotten bent.  
  3. I have never been able to successfully print anything close to 8".  There is a limit around .25 - .5" from the edge of the build platform that, if hit, causes the belt to skip. If this happens it not only ruins the job, but I have to disassemble and realign everything or subsequent prints will come out all screwed up. It's a total nightmare and must be avoided.  I would not buy this printer for it's build platform size.

Besides that, the stock filament holder situation lead to a lot of failed print jobs early on.  Filament would always fall off the side of the reel and get hung up.  There are a lot of ways to fix this fairly easily though.  (I printed some reel clips that do a good job of keeping the filament on, but they are a pain to put on every time and are easily lost).



My friend recently got a Replicator 2x, and it's awesome.  A lot more expensive, but probably what I should have gotten.  Then again, 3D printing is still in its early stages, and as they say... the grass is always greener on the other side.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Reaper, Linux, and the Behringer X-Air - Complete Studio Solution, Part 1

Introduction and Rationale This is part one of a major effort to document my experiences with recreating my home studio, entirely using Linux.  Without getting into too many of the specifics, a few months ago I decided that I was unhappy with Windows' shenanigans - to the point that I was ready to make a serious attempt to leave it behind.  For most in this situation, the obvious choice is to switch to Mac OS.  With its proven track record, support, and options for multimedia production, it is naturally the first alternative to consider if your goal is to simply use something other than Windows. For me the choice was not so simple. I despise Mac OS and, in general, the goals and philosophies put forth by Apple in an effort to ostensibly provide users with an "easy" working environment.  It does not help that I have also failed to find any aspect of the Mac OS UI intuitive, but I realize that this is a subjective matter. With my IT background and user-control* favori

An Alternative Take on AI Doom and Gloom

 I've purposely held my tongue until now on commenting about "AI" (or, more specifically as has come to be known, GAN or Generative Adversarial Networks).  It seems like it is very in-style to complain about how it has made a real mess of things, it is displacing jobs, the product it creates lacks soul, it's going to get smart and kill us all, etc. etc.  But I'm not here to do any of that. Rather I am going to remind everyone of how amazing a phenomenon it is to watch a disruptive technology becoming democratized From the time of its (seeming) introduction to the public at large, around November of 2022, to late 2023, the growth and adoption rate has been nothing short of explosive. It features the fastest adoption rate of any new technology ever, by a broad margin.  To give a reference, the adoption rate for AI image and text generation, real-world uses, in just 12 months is comparable to all of that of the another disruptive technology, the World Wide Web, takin

RANT TIME: Why do replies to a message I sent go to my spam folder?

Despite what one would think/hope, sending a message to a given address does not inherently give Google a high confidence that a reply from this address is expected (and, for example, that it should bypass spam checks). I have confirmed with Google's tech support that there is no way to automatically have this happen. The user can do the following: 1. Add the address to your contacts list in Gmail. 2. Check spam folder for replies, and mark it as "not spam" if something ends up there, which should influence the fate of future replies received. I can also approve an address at the domain level, i.e. if it is a big vendor or similar. I've had to do this with several of our Chinese vendors. I regularly ask engineering and purchasing to give me a list of the supplies we deal with, so I can approve them as a preventative measure. For what it's worth, all of the false positive instances of reply -> spam we have experienced have involved the sender's email server