Rebuilding my Ord Hadron

[geoffs]

Finally got the bed properly level.!
The Lava bed has nine, sprung mount points and while the spring was installed on the centre mount point, there was no screw as it would have been impossible to adjust it. As the bed seems to be bowing up in the centre, I removed the centre spring (green) completely.
Now I can adjust each corner (red) to the same height and then adjust the side screws blue so there is no gap between the PCB and the glass.
First print after adjustment printed perfectly.

A larger print didn't go as well. There were large temperature variations causing the message 'cold extrude prevented' and subsequent gaps in the print. I've already done a PID autotune so time for a little manual tweaking and more testing.

EDIT: A few tweaks to the PID parameters and now the temperature stays within 2-3 degrees of what it should be. It takes a little longer to get up to temperature initially bit I can live with that if it means I get prints that work. Next issue is cooling. I have a fan but it mostly blows on the J-Head body rather than the print so I think either a second fan, not a lot of room on the X-axis platform for that, or a shroud to redirect the air. The shroud means I'll have to get ABS printing sorted out.

[geoffs]

Well my 3d printing has come to an end for a while. My crappy Geeetech RAMPS 1.4 board caught fire.
To be more accurate, the power connector melted but the end result is the same.

Just when I was making good progress with printing ABS

[fulg]

Wow, thankfully nothing bad happened. Cheap boards are almost a fire hazard, as many do not even use proper connectors to support the amperage going through them; I'm not surprised it melted. Hopefully you can get a better board soon and get back to it!

Cheers,
Ben.

[geoffs]

I was desperate to get back on the air when my original RAMPS had a fault (FET and/or fuse) so got what was available locally. The image on the website I bought it from showed a green PCB, not red. If' I'd seen red, I've have guessed Geeetech and not bought it.
That said, I bought a new socket on Thursday and soldered it in, new wires and plug and tested it out tonight - works OK.
I should order some replacement FETs and fuses and fix the other two (green) RAMPS boards I have.

Currently printing with ABS (235C/110C) and it seems to be going well.A bit of manual PID tuning now keeps the temperature within a degree or 2 of target.
While the hairspray works like a charm for PLA, it's not so good for ABS so I've gone back to applying an ABS slurry, messy but effective.

EDIT: Spoke too soon. First part of the print, (the ring from this filament holder - http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:117627) went OK. Printing 3 of the arms and about 10 minutes from the end, temperature started to fluctuate +/- 30C and eventually, pronterface threw up an Error 0 and the print stopped. No idea what an error 0 is other than its fatal. Hotend has a new thermistor so I don't think the problem is there. More testing today.

[3dtech]

I had finished it up quickly, so I could give it to my brother. They are great machines once you get them tuned. I think with the newer versions of Marlin there is just a simple setting in the Configuration_adv.h, but if that fails you can just set the E1 pins to match the Z pin number in pins.h for your board if I'm remembering correctly. 3d printing chennai hyderabad india