Today’s To-Do LIst:
Begin printing parts on 3D printer.
Church.
Discover spaghetti mess.
Lose religion because of anger invoked.
Print more (of the same) parts.

Sunday, bloody Sunday. That is today. But all the aggravation is over now, and now I am looking toward the week ahead. I decided to roughly calculate the progress on each of the projects. The project names/numbers are still the same as they were from the last update, and new ones, of course, have new names.

Project Name                  Progression Level

Project PHB                    33%

Project Bee                     20%

Project BNo                     70%

Project ShG                     5%

Project BCH                    55%

Project SvN                     40%

Project ORI                      20%

So I guess the aggravation isn’t over now, seeing that the main project–Project PHB–is wayyyyyy behind (should be 2/3 done by now, not 1/3). I’m beginning to see why it hasn’t been invented yet. That’s okay, though, because I will persevere on this and all the other inventions!

Just can’t let up.

And I won’t.

Never do.

ZOMG. Hax.

Grrrrrrrrrrr. I experienced my first major hiccup with the 3D printer today. I came into the workshop, only to find that my parts had only been built about halfway. The rest of the thermoplastic that was supposed to have extruded through the print head had instead somehow gotten lodged behind the shield, which obviously meant it wasn’t contacting the part. But it doesn’t stop there. What apparently happened was that the sensors on the machine–the ones that are supposed to halt all work if an anomaly occurs–didn’t detect anything, so the printer head just kept trying to extrude.

Luckily, it didn’t jam up the printer tip itself (which could have been very bad), so no permanent damage was done. The reason it didn’t jam up was because the blob of material stuck behind the shield kept blobbing off (yep, that’s a term now) and making massive, flattened sphere-cones below. I don’t know how else to describe it. Each sphere-cone was connected with a fairly long piece of crazily curled thermoplastic (itself). These pieces of plastic looked like a jumbled mess of semi-hardened spaghetti, so that is what it is being called now.

Unfortunately, I can’t just tell the machine to start back where it screwed up, which means that I had to trash all the work on the parts already done. And you’d be surprised how much these rolls of thermoplastic cost. Here’s a picture to the right above of how the printer head looked after I found it. You can sorta make out a white blob behind the shield. This was a bear to separate from the printer (which is obviously a requirement before I can run the machine again). It required much patience. Luckily, I have an ample supply!

I can’t show you picture of the spaghetti itself because the only pictures I thought to take were when it was still inside the machine. With the parts. The secret parts. The parts were in the picture. Sorry about that. I say “sorry” because now that I am not as aggravated at what happened, the spaghetti is kinda cool, and I wish you could see it. It’s just interesting how that would have happened… The picture to the left above is the view when I was finally able to force the plastic behind the shield to melt enough to begin prying the shield off.

I know this doesn’t seem like a big deal, but if this happens on one of my major part builds (thank God this wasn’t one of those), then it can get extremely costly. Not just in money, but in time. Around $200 each time I press the “Print” button and 42-48 hours lost. Good. Stuff.