First print. Big failure! Help?

I spent the better part of the afternoon trying to get the nozzle within .3mm from the bed. I was going for .15mm but every time I adjusted on one side it would be off elsewhere, so I guess .3mm will have to do.

When I pressed the "home all" button on repsnapper, the z axis went up and then down again. But it didn't go down as much as it went up, so it was like 1mm or more from the bed. Why is that?

Anyways, after spending a lot of time at thingiverse looking for a small part to print, I found a small a "ball clip cap" here: [www.thingiverse.com]

I turned it into gcode using skeinforge. I then uploaded the gcode in repsnapper and pressed print.
Here's the result:

[img593.imageshack.us]
[img69.imageshack.us]

As you can see it was a big failure.

It took at least an hour to print what should have been a cap. I sat there the whole time keeping en eye on things.
The first thing I noticed is that the nozzle was too high off the bed. I didn't lower the z axis after pressing the "home all" button, thinking it would adjust itself, but guess not. The next thing I noticed was that the extruder motor didn't move once during the whole print! Those little blobs you see on the bed is molten ABS dripping from the nozzle. The temp was set at 250C.
There's also too much play in the bed, plus the y axis belt is too loose.

Anyways, I could use some helping figuring out why the extruder didn't do anything. After the print was done, I pressed the extruder button to see if it works, and it does. So why didn't it do anything during the print?
Also, before I print anything, do I need to lower the z axis all the way? Isn't it suppose to that itself?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.


EDIT: Does anyone have a small STL that I can use that doesn't take over an hour to print? It sucks having to wait over an hour when you know within the first 5 mins if the print is a failure. I looked for a "cancel print" button, but I guess it doesn't have one?

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/22/2012 05:59PM by wikisi.

Turn on the dimension module within skeinforge. That will generate E codes which will drive the extruder, without dimension the code attempts to use obsolete gcodes to control an old style extruder.You will also want to add G28 X0 Y0 Z0 to your start.gcode to instruct the printer to home on all axes first thing.

While you're at it, add G92 E0 to zero your current E position, otherwise the extruder behaves oddly if you run gcode after using the extrude button.

As for cancelling a print - close the program, reset the electronics. There should be a cancel button somewhere, but brute force works just fine.

The problem may be with skeinforge. I just got a different STL file from the same page I linked to in the first post. This time, instead of using skeinforge to convert to gcode, I just repsnapper to convert to gcode. When I pressed print it went all the way down, plus the extruder worked. Thing is, I messed up my extruder. The temp sensor is loose, so instead of the molten plastic coming out of the nozzle, it's coming out of the hole where the temp sensor goes. Not sure what to do about that. Maybe take the thing that the nozzle screws into off, tap the hole and put a screw in it to close the hole. I won't have a temp sensor though. Maybe I can superglue the temp sensor back in. Yeah, I'll try that first.

The hole for the temp sensor isn't meant to go all the way to the melt chamber Tap it, put in a screw, drill a new one and tape the sensor in place. Superglue will not stand up to the heat for long so don't bother with it.

As for skeinforge - if you turned on dimension and tweaked start.gcode and it still isn't working, post the start of the gcode it creates here and see if someone spots anything wrong with it.

Well, looks like I won't be printing anything anymore:

[img403.imageshack.us]

That's just great!

any chance of using liquid glass to fix it. it is the same stuff used to fix car exhaust leaks.


read about it here [en.wikipedia.org]. it basically is glass that is a glue.

I kind of have a crappy connector on my z-axis endstop. It often loses contact and triggers it when trying to home. Can you move the z up and down with no problems or does it just go up?

Sucks about the hotend but I killed my first one with an epic crash into the bed in my first few days too. It's a nice relief when it finally starts working like it should. Don't let the learning curve get you down.