The First Disaster

I printed one more Astronaut Phil-A-Ment while tweaking the Z offset a little more and he adhered just fine. It was going well and I left him to print on his own.

Sometime later on ... and I come back to see the disaster. Phil has unstuck himself from the bed and there is filament spaghetti all over. What a mess! I clean it up and things are still not sticking. It's late in the day so I decide to work on this the next day.

A couple of days later I had tried another print and had some problems with curl (with PLA?) but that was not the real problem - it was only a symptom.

In the process of switching back to PLA I had encounter a clog. I had to disassemble the hot end and get things cleaned out. I had watched a video of how to do this (actually for the Mini Select which uses the same not end) some days before and was confident that I could do it. Unfortunately I left out something - you MUST heat up the hot end before you re-install the nozzle. This caused the nozzle to leak and there was plastic all over the hot end.

The real reason Phil had detached himself from the bed was that he was knocked over. A glob of plastic had dripped on to the top of the print and then hardened. When the nozzle came back across that area it forced him to slide off of his position.

Cleaning up the mess was no simple job. The insulating blanket (cotton and Kapton tape) was soaked with hardened plastic and would have to be replaced. The threads on the nozzle, heat brake, and heater block were gunked up with hardened plastic.

I ordered a replacement insulating blanket (comes only in 2-pack so I have a spare) and had to wait a week for it to show up. I did clean up the threads on the nozzle and heat brake with a brass wire brush. No problem with that. The threads inside the heat block required a tool though - a 6mm tap. I had to buy one and that was about $7. I later bought a set of metric taps - which I should have done in the first place. That all worked just fine.

I cleaned things up a bit but to get the blanket off I had to remove the thermistor. This is a part that is held in the heating block by some high temperature silicone. One more thing to buy ... another $7 spent cleaning up this mess.

To clean up the hardened plastic on the heater block I had to heat it up. I of course had to reinstall the thermistor and arrange the whole thing to just hang in the air so I could grab it with some pliers and scrape the gunk off as it got heated up. This was an exciting job and it took far longer to get it set up than it did to actually do it.

I put it all back together (properly this time) and it all worked just fine. A lot of work and about $20 in parts and tools and about 10 days later it's working again. I'll never make this mistake again!