Problems with Printing

We had recently encountered some problems with our MakerBot, and items being printed peeling away from the base. This then resulted in the strepstruder knocking the object out of alignment and messing up the print.

In response to this I adjusted the heat on the MakerBot so the base was now heating up to 115 Degrees F.

The results for this can be seen below:

Black and white cube

The box above printed nicely in two colors and the print was also clean with few rough edges to be filed down afterwards.

Disaster strikes

However shortly after printing this object we had a major problem.

The build plate must have been a fraction too high as the next object we printed resulted in the strepstruder being jammed into the platform. Unfortunately nobody was watching the Makerbot at the time so it was a few minutes until we saw the problem and canceled the print.

The damage can be seen below:

Strepstrudder damage

We cleaned off the plastic and also removed the film from the build plate. At this point I also noticed that the black plastic spool was jammed slightly. Having fixed the jam I re-ran the diagnostics on the MakerBot and the plastic seemed to be exiting the extruder as expected, so it looks like there was no long-term damage to the printer.

Our next steps will be to recover the build plate and try another print on Monday morning. As a result of this we will also be instituting a policy that anyone using the MakerBot has to be present for the first 5 minutes of the print to ensure that there are no jams, and the plate is level and hasn’t been knocked out of alignment, thus resulting in damage to the printer.