Printing out problems: a critical analyis of the school 3-D printer after 900 hours of use10/30/2018 By Joseph Aaronson 3D printing is an incredibly flexible and limitless tool for quickly making tools or objects for a wide variety of things, but over time problems begin to emerge when the printer begins to show its signs of wear. I have been given the privilege of being able to use the 3D printer in our print room, a Makerbot Replicator 2X, for projects in classes of mine. I was also the go-to guy for assistance with classmates because I have had experience working with them prior to using the printer here, thanks to having access to one at home. After spending some time calibrating and several hours of rest printing to work out kinks, a 3D printer should work flawlessly with anything you throw at it. In the right hands, a single 300-400 dollar printer can last thousands of hours before beginning to wear out. However, when using the school’s 3D printer, the experience has not been very positive, mainly because of one big problem. Our 3D printer’s main problem that keeps it from working properly is a complete lack of plate adhesion. With normal 3D printers, the melted plastic that is being pushed out at the beginning of a print sticks to the plate of metal that holds the build, using tape, glue, or a combination of several things. The school’s 3D printer no longer has this as much as it should. As the ABS plastic used by the printer cools during the process of printing, if the build plate is either too hot or too cold the plastic will cool unevenly and warp, pulling itself off of the plate and popping off mid-print. In normal cases this is a non issue, because any warping that the print would do is prevented by a strong adhesion to the build plate and careful preparation to make sure that it cool evenly, But since the printer we have been using for years no longer manages to get the plastic to stick, almost every print fails due to the print coming off mid-printing. The 3D printer has logged over 900 hours of printing, put along the way have accumulated some large problems that need fixing if the printer is expected to print well again. And while the problems with the printer can be fixed with several hours of tinkering and troubleshooting, the problems likely wouldn’t have arisen if the students working with it were more knowledgeable with the 3D printer, which is why I want to make more blog posts like these so students have a pool of resources to use to make sure that the printer is well maintained and in tip-top shape from here on.
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