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So, an oddity to report that I had not had happen on the Ender-3 Pro, which is the Monoprice MP10-Mini decided to shed all the little brass teeth from the PTFE (Bowden ) tube coupler from the extruder end of the tube. Never heard of that happening before.

On the MP10-Mini, the tube is not intended to be serviced- it and the hot end cabling are all wrapped together inside I woven material sleeve which is secured with zip ties- very strong, very neat. I found the problem when I went to set up the next print, and saw the filament sticking out of the wrap like a bone protrusion from a compound fracture.

Fortunately, the machine came with a spare, but it's a non-standard type of coupler (not an M6 or M10, like most other printers have). And worse, Monoprice themselves don't carry them at the moment, and I didn't find any on Amazon, eBay or Etsy.

I may have to refurbish the old one somehow, or adapt a coupler from a different printer. I'll get a pic of it up here tomorrow.

"Whom the gods would make great, they first make mad."

Ouch, that's strange. I'm sure you could probably find the part on one of those chinese sites that sells replacement parts for everything. Can't think of the name right now.

My Ender replacement parts were here today over a day and a half early. I have already replaced the magnetic pad. I would have jumped into the other stuff, but had to replace four tires today and then had company this evening. Right when I was about to i turned on the computer to see that Ultimaker has released Cura 4.7.0, so I have just now downloaded that. Hopefully the new plate helps with the warped bases as I printed a Ramp for gaslands which is a partially sunken bus. The edges were curled again. I got a few other prints done as well, but none large enough to show me thewarp of my print bed.

The other parts that came will mean a major overhaul for the Ender, so I need extra time to disassemble and replace certain things like the stock springs.

The drive gear for the filament does not take much to strip if you have the factory brass. Lots of stainless steel replacements out there fairly cheap. When I bought the aluminum extruder drive replacement it came with a SS gear.

Also, if referring to the springs on the bed, I just added a few washers to greatly increase the tension and they work great.

That's a good trick with the washers- I'll remember that!

I got a good deal off amazon. At least in my eyes. $22 for the capricorn tubing (1m), nice new heavy duty springs and replacement extruder top with gears. Just too busy to mess with that till this weekend.

When I get tired of Gaslands stuff I'm going to pimp my Ender3 some more. When I change the springs I'll finally attach the handle I made for the print bed. Also want to add some rail covers in spots.

"Pimp my Ender"- should be a TV show for printer geeks like us!

The Armiger looks very very cool ...temptation to get a printer rising...

In the words of Chancellor Palpatine, 'DO IT!' Not sure of it's still active, but Creality had a ludicrous price drop on the Ender 3 last week, almost a hundred quid less than what I paid for mine on Amazon.

Going to sit down and properly calibrate my Ender tonight, hopefully kill a few birds with one stone and sort out my stringing and blobbing problems along with what I suspect to be either general over-extrusion or a slightly wrong Z offset that's caused a few supports to be knocked over even on an ostensibly level bed. I'm happy enough with my slice settings for the time being, but I think I can get more out of a more precisely dialed in printer.

 Paradigm wrote:
In the words of Chancellor Palpatine, 'DO IT!' Not sure of it's still active, but Creality had a ludicrous price drop on the Ender 3 last week, almost a hundred quid less than what I paid for mine on Amazon.

Going to sit down and properly calibrate my Ender tonight, hopefully kill a few birds with one stone and sort out my stringing and blobbing problems along with what I suspect to be either general over-extrusion or a slightly wrong Z offset that's caused a few supports to be knocked over even on an ostensibly level bed. I'm happy enough with my slice settings for the time being, but I think I can get more out of a more precisely dialed in printer.

I know I’ll be retuning mine this weekend with replacing the deck, springs and other items. I feel I wasted a days print by going too soft on detail to cut a print down to 11hours instead of 20. I can probably save it with effort, just have such a backlog of things I want to do that any hiccup hurts .

So I didn’t replace springs or anything major this weekend . Instead I removed the old magnetic base which had bubbles and played around a bit.

Productivity was good .

That’s about a weeks worth of prints with a couple large failures that were half day prints. (F15 crash/ramp and a 40’ container which didn’t stick to the old bed).

So some Gaslands highlights.
Two pack of 16mm knobby tires (printed two sets), the two tire print takes about 16 minutes.

BoomBox. Don’t think I’ve seen a Miskin van before, so why not .

The tires are fatties(double the width of normal tires) and a pair of them takes 38minutes. The exhaust stacks are 14minutes each and the speaker system up top also took 38 minutes. Still needs stuff, but getting there. Tempted to paint him like the A-team van.

Lastly my flying car.

I’ll probably use it as a gyrocopter even though it’s far too beefy looking. Added the three canister pack on the doors on each side. 6minute prints each.
The fence is one of three from a set and will just be nice scatter terrain.

I know Gaslands is a post apocalyptic game, but I’m terrible at ramshackle builds. So I’m thinking my table will probably be more of an aircraft tarmac, though some prints just won’t make sense there either . I looked for inspiration in different places, but most everyone just has wastelands. My car destruction desires come more from playing Twisted Metal than Mad Max, and I loved the different fields like the race track, Paris and LA. Oh well, no paint until I have enough crap made so I have time.

Blimey, that is a chunk of stuff printed out this weekend, are you in pretty much 24 hour production now?

I am just wandering how long it will take until you are in full time mass production of your own designs for selling

 Theophony wrote:
Oh well, no paint until I have enough crap made so I have time.

I seem to remember posting a warning about how this would slow your painting production.

Cheers,

CB

So I playeda bit with a larger print today(40' container, the ones in the picture above were 20'). For a long while i have been printing everything on rafts because of my old print bed. Having replaced it i printed without a raft and got a good print. So some larger prints will be tested without now(it saved an hour on print time and saved material as well. I also dropped my print resolution down with very little loss of detail, though it was a shipping container, so not much detail to start with, I'll slowly try it out on other models as that too saves time.


BIG QUESTION FOR YOU ALL.
How much is your hobby time worth?

What do I mean?
(Begins ramble) So With the cura 4.6.0 and now 4.7.0 upgrade i did, i can tell how much each print costs me. It's great to make something from a free file and $0.02 cents of material that would cost me $5-8 to buy for my hobby horde, but what's the real price? I mean it might take me 5 minutes to find the file and slice it, 2 hours to print it, so what's the real price? Minimum wage is like $9 around here i think, so i spent 2 hours is that print really $18 and I just wasted money? Or is it still only $0.02 so I have saved $4.98. I guess i'm trying to decide if I'm wasting time on smaller prints or if I'm actually making something valuable to me. I know I'm enjoying the time, and it's not taking away from anything, but i just wonder where my efforts should be.

Probably made no sense

No, it makes sense, but I think you have to factor in what you’d pay for 2 hours of entertainment to balance the cost of your time against. I guess you also don’t need to sit and watch the print, though I can see how they’d be mesmerising! When you factor that in I think you’ll be much closer to the cost of materials. The Project Manager in me loves that the program shows you the cost of the print! I’m closer to justifying a printer myself, but I need to trim the pile first before I add infinitely to it!

 gobert wrote:
No, it makes sense, but I think you have to factor in what you’d pay for 2 hours of entertainment to balance the cost of your time against. I guess you also don’t need to sit and watch the print, though I can see how they’d be mesmerising! When you factor that in I think you’ll be much closer to the cost of materials. The Project Manager in me loves that the program shows you the cost of the print! I’m closer to justifying a printer myself, but I need to trim the pile first before I add infinitely to it!

See, I don't watch the print......most of the time , though i wish I did last night. My 10 hour print I started before dinner stopped less than 2 hours into the print, so my machine sat for 8 hours powered on, but not printing and the heat went down to idle temperatures. This happens to me quit a bit as I don't give it "Down time". Basically it goes on strike and collapses.

While the machine is printing I'm either at work, asleep(not at work ), with my family or sitting at the computer next to it looking for and slicing files. I could also be cleaning the supports or modifying the Gaslands cars that I'm printing parts for, so I'm double dipping as it were.

I guess I'm just trying to still justify what I'm doing. Not getting to game still I guess I don't see the possitive side right now.

The thing to keep in mind though is what else are you doing while it prints? You're unlikely to be sat staring at the printer throughout... so you don't really need to take into account the minimum wage for the print time? If you consider the print may be running while you're at work or sleeping... that's not wasted hobby time for you. That's *extra* hobby time. for example, when it doesn't fail, a resin tank will cost me somewhere in the region of £4 for something that Forgeworld would charge £80 for and the printing is done overnight... so that's definitely a win.

The main thing is if you're enjoying printing these files it isn't wasted at all, that's what our hobby is.

Well, if you wanted to calculate the hours and charges you spend doing a lot of things it would drive you crazy.

"I will save money tonight and make dinner for my family. I spend the time to shop, cut, prepare, cook, clean and serve - probably almost 2 hours in total. The food itself only cost 11.49, but factor in my time at a minimum of $20/hr, it just became a $50 meal - heck, let's just go to McDonalds..."

I guess what got me calculating is my new office I’ll be opening in October is about 45 minutes from my house. Trying to calculate whether it’s worth it time wise for me or not. So I started looking at it economically and then I looked at the printer from an economic stand point as well.

Anyways, tried reducing the print quality to get a massive terrain piece done in less time. While the details are good enough on some sides, the beveled edge was just so wavy that I said stop and popped it off the print bed before looking at the rest. Hindsight , I should have let it go as I’ll just cover the sloped part with texture paste anyway . Wasted 9 hours or about $1 worth of material, but I’ve learned again I’m an idiot .

The neat little bit I take away from the image is the reflection of the polygons. Kind of cool.

So the trade off of speed versus final print. I don’t think I want to take the full 42 hours to print this at detail level of 0.08, this I had at .2 I believe, which would have been about 16 hours. Slicing right now at 0.16 would have it coming in at 19hrs. Will realize at 0.12 which I know will still be fine and see where that ends up (25hrs).

So dropping the quality down to 0.16 (1/2 my usual print quality) completed the job in 18hours and 4 minutes.

I did not use a raft on it as it was so big it would have added another 1-2 hours and it was not going to move around on me anyway. Plus there are some “loose bricks” at the base which would most likely have stuck to the raft and me off when I would try to remove it. There are some strange support structures that I don’t know why they even exist, but otherwise a decent print quality.

The inside bank layer height still has some visible layers, but texture pate would cover that.

Stringing has returned, I think that I’m going to bump my retraction levels up. The Cura settings default was at 3mm , I’ve been at 0.65 I think

I almost have a full tables worth of terrain to plop down for Gaslands, but there’s more variety that needs to be printed still.

Back to reslicing my lost files.

Some projects I need to mull over.
F15 ramp (even bigger/inker print than this piece) but I think it would be a great centerpiece, just not sold on print time as I’d want a much better quality print for it than this one.
Resizing the Gear Phase tracker. It’s a nice piece, just needs to be bigger (x2 or x3) for actual gameplay/tabletop use.
More hazard/gear counters. I have four working ones (broke the original), but I could do with another 6 for a full sized game.
Bullet Dice......yes. Have sliced 12, it’s a 9 hour print, so probably when I go to bed tonight.
Guns, more guns, bigger guns.

Well, after way too much procrastination, I finally tried taking apart the extruder's internals on my Finder. Even after I'd cleared the earlier blockage, i was still having issues. So, the only other option left to me was to take out the heating element and see what's going on inside those parts.

I found that there was another blockage in the opening of the extruder where the filament feeds into it and a blob of plastic sitting at the bottom of the Bowden Tube. So that explains why I couldn't push anything through. The blockage up top prevented my tools from getting in, though I doubt I could have fully cleared it anyway. The tube was pretty badly blocked up. So, I swapped out the tube for a higher quality one that I bought and I replaced the nozzle as well for good measure.

After a small issue with the servo arm getting in the way. I am now able to print again! I seem to be having issues with under-extrusion on the initial layer for some reason, but everything I've printed out so far has been decent.

Now, if I could just take care of my stringing problem.

 Barzam wrote:
Well, after way too much procrastination, I finally tried taking apart the extruder's internals on my Finder. Even after I'd cleared the earlier blockage, i was still having issues. So, the only other option left to me was to take out the heating element and see what's going on inside those parts.

I found that there was another blockage in the opening of the extruder where the filament feeds into it and a blob of plastic sitting at the bottom of the Bowden Tube. So that explains why I couldn't push anything through. The blockage up top prevented my tools from getting in, though I doubt I could have fully cleared it anyway. The tube was pretty badly blocked up. So, I swapped out the tube for a higher quality one that I bought and I replaced the nozzle as well for good measure.

After a small issue with the servo arm getting in the way. I am now able to print again! I seem to be having issues with under-extrusion on the initial layer for some reason, but everything I've printed out so far has been decent.

Now, if I could just take care of my stringing problem.

Yeah, switching the bowden tube over to the Capricorn tubing and making sure it was all the way in is important. On one of my earlier pages I showed my extruder engulfed in plastic due to a clog and had to replace the whole part.






all have some take aways with stringing. I have not made my sleeve insert yet, so not sure how that fairs. Using the better program has helped some, but I am still getting some stringing.

Yep, Capricorn was what I bought. So far, so good. Though, I have printing on hold right now due to our excessive heat. I'd hate to have a 23 hour print interrupted by a rolling blackout.

So far, I haven't been able to find advice on stringing that's actually worked. I'll check those videos later. Maybe they'll have some suggestions I have tried yet. I'd love to build some Makerscult tanks, but that isn't happening until the stringing is conquered.

Still not tired of winning with the Monoprice MP-10 Mini (print bed size equivalent to the Ender-3).

This was such a nice print, I wanted to post two pics here, more on my own thread; this is the bell shrine from the first Iain Lovecraft kickstarter the 'Hobgoblin City':






I arranged it to print all three pieces as one print job in Cura (using 4.6.2 currently, but will update to 4.7 when time permits). You can see in the first pic the ordinary masking tape I have to put down because adhesion is too strong!

I am so looking forward to making that print once this KS ends and delivers.




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So while looking for an answer to fixing my SD card I may have learned the issue. I bought a 64GB micro SD, seems with having to format it as a FAT32, FAT32 cannot save files over 4GB . No wonder its larger prints that I keep loosing. Plus i'll need to partition ( ) the drive. I'll look into that later. Basically even though I have a 64GB drive it can also only hold up to 32GB of material or it'll crash. Makes no sense to me, but TECHNOLOGY .

Reformating the disk now.

Sorry to hear of the tech limitation with the SD card/printer operating system, Theo. Can the motherboard be upgraded for more memory? And I agree- sometimes 'Technology!' (said in Thomas Dolby's voice from his song "She blinded me with science") is all you can say sometimes in Family-PG friendly shows. Not nearly as satisfying, of course.

Here's the three different houses from Iain Lovecraft's first Asian Kickstarter (Hobgoblin City) that I've got completed (the roof for the second style of house- in grey PLA) wasn't quite done before I had to leave last Friday morning):













Some quick notes:

The roofs of the larger houses are interchangeable, as you can see- I actually like the ornate roof on the square pattern decoration house base, but they both look good, I think.

All three have playable interiors.

I think it would be easy to cut out the doorways and build simple sliding doors, to be able to represent locked/unlocked houses.

Even with the printed 'base' for the houses to sit on, they're a bit lower than the courtyard tiles around them. I think a piece of poster/foam core board cut to shape would be the perfect spacer to get them to the right height.

I tells ya, after this walled estate project is printed, I'm half tempted to try printing out the pagoda- all seven stories of it! Fingers crossed that the printer holds up!

More follows soonest.

Are you doing those with FDM? Highlord Tamburlaine has been threatening to make me print some of that guy's stuff as well. Any issues I need to be aware of, or are these some of those wonderful "fdm optimized" files where I don't need any supports?

Hi Barzam! Yes, these are the mythical, unicorn-like FDM-optimized .stl files that do not need supports. Even the wall section with the completely circular 'porthole' opening in it needed no supports. I'm using the Monoprice MP10-Mini and Cura 4.6.2 as my slicer. Cura doesn't yet have settings for the MP10-Mini, so I'm using the stock profile for the CR-10 with heat settings adjusted to 205 for the hot end, 65 for the bed. At the moment, I'm using Creality PLA left over from trying to make an Ender-3 Pro work and it seem to be doing fine, but there are a lot of good PLA filament makers out there.

The pieces from the kickstarter have very good detail and the subject matter lends itself to FDM printing (I think) in that everything is given a bit of texture by the depositional process. I smoothed it on the first batch by undercoating with some matt varnish, but this ate away (loosened the thread layers) in some places, so in future I plan to just use two thin primer coats and call it good.

Overall, I'm very happy with Iain's files and the work in the new campaign is everything from the old one, plus an equal amount of new designs.

Like Theo, I need about ten printers going full time to crank out everything I want to print!


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh, and another very good designer is Evan Carothers- I've backed several of his campaigns and his stuff is also optimized for FDM, no supports. Everything from Norse to Persian Medieval and everything in between!

Meer_Cat you are making me jealous with those. I can’t wait to get all of these files and start building away.

I have found a file finally for a GW paint pegboard piece that I halfway like. I’ve printed a few, but have to do them one at a time due to the slight curve in my print bed .

I have also gotten a ton of Gaslands stuff printed out and am actually impressed with the finish of some Gaslands car drivers with guns. 8-10minute prints each. Pics at some point in the future as I’m tired and lazy right now.

I've been looking around for a good paint storage system- do you have a pic of one of your pegboard prints? And where did you get the file?

On the other hand, didn't you build a great paint storage system out of PVC pipe pieces? That project was ace!

 Meer_Cat wrote:
I've been looking around for a good paint storage system- do you have a pic of one of your pegboard prints? And where did you get the file?

On the other hand, didn't you build a great paint storage system out of PVC pipe pieces? That project was ace!

Thanks, The PVC rack was good for a time, and dirt cheap, but the thickness of the pvc meant that it took up a LOT of space. So when I saw the designs on thingiverse I printed the army painter/vallejo racks. I need to print another section now as i have more paints.



Then I have a ton of GW paints as well. Still not sold on this option, but it's the best I found so far for a pegboard set up.

You can see the bamboo Drawer spacers that i had used for the paints, but they also worked great for models, so if I can get back to using those for models it would be Ideal.

There's also stacking GW paint racks thay I might give a try.