My first 3D Printer is a Rostock Max -- Build Log From Maine

[AndThenSome09]

After soaking for the night and a few hours with some tiny pick tools and a very small drill bit powered by hand I got the hot end free from the clog! Back to printing I went. I printed out a stretchlet, it came out alright but not the best. The layers around the outside are very thick and choppy, I dont know if its because of the .stl file I began with or the way it was sliced but it did not have nice fine layers like my test cube did. I dont know, here are some pics:

[AndThenSome09]

I was having a very hard time getting my first layer to stick fully, I got tired of failed print after failed print so I did some research and came to the conclusion that I needed to cover my glass build surface with Kapton tape and prepare some ABS Juice to use on top of it.

I added about 4 ounces of Acetone to an old fingernail polish remover bottle and cut up about 7 - 8 feet of natural 1.75 mm ABS filament closed the cap good and started shaking the bottle like crazy. Once that was all dissolved in there I had a fairly thick milky looking substance.

As far as putting the Kapton tape on the glass I found an awesome little trick which worked wonders, sorry don't remember where I found out about this but thought I'd share since it works so well. If you want to cover your glass with Kapton tape then this is how you should do it: Clean your glass with alcohol. Grab some sort of plastic Tupperware dish or big bowl, put a few drops of Dawn in there (im sure any dish soap will do its just what I had) and fill it up about halfway or so, doesn't need to be precise. Now pull out your Kapton tape and cut off a length long enough that it hangs over the edges of the glass a little. Take your length of Kapton tape and slide it through the soapy water fully submerging it and taking it right back out, make sure you dip the whole length so its all wet and soapy. Now just shake off whatever excess and apply it to the glass. The water allows you to slide it around and get it into place easily, makes it easy to but each strip against one another. Once in place then take a credit card or some kind of plastic card and squeegee the water and any air bubbles out from underneath it, just like putting tint on a cars windows, leave in place and keep on repeating until you have the whole area covered as you want it. Once it has dried a bit and is sticking in place pretty well then grab a new razor blade and slice around the edges of the glass to cut off any extra. Now you are done and you have perfect tape on your glass with no bubbles or anything. If you want to print on no tape then just flip your glass over. Pretty simple but it works amazingly well guys. Just thought someone may find it useful !

Here's a pic of everything you'll need:

Here's the finished product:

[AndThenSome09]

By the way, between the Kapton and a layer of ABS Juice my prints stick absolutely wonderfully now! It's like night and day, before a lot of times it wouldnt even print the ring around the object without lifting and being drug all over the place just building up on the nozzle, I think that was why my hot end clogged in the first place because there was so much built up on the nozzle that it had nowhere to go and ended up backing up into the chamber. But we r all good now!! Im happy with the results, and my parts are coming out spectacular!

[AndThenSome09]

So I was having a lot of problems getting my prints to stick well to my glass, no matter what I tried I just could not get it to stick good until I made some ABS Juice but I had to put down a fairly thick layer in order for it to stick which I knew couldn't be right because everything I was seeing said that just a thin layer will do. And even then my prints were not coming out the greatest, my perimeters would not meet with the infill some of the perimeters were not even meeting (I had perimeters set to 3). The only thing I could think of was that somehow my Z height at 0 was just too high off the build surface and that my machine was somehow out of calibration, so I set out to tackle re-calibration of my Rostock Max which I have named "Midnight Delta" I homed the machine and then took better care this time around in measuring the distance from bed to nozzle tip then added 2 to that number and came out with 365mm. Then I did the paper test in the center and subtracted 4.80mm from 365mm ending up with 360.2mm for my XYZ Max Lengths. Then using my scripts that were still set up from my initial calibration I went from tower to tower doing the paper test and turning my end stop screws until they were all the same and once they were I tested the center and wouldn't ya know it I am not the luckiest guy around and it was not grabbing the paper the same as the towers! So now I had to go through the fun of changing my firmware, uploading the changes, and then doing the whole tower sequence over and over about 5 or 6 times until it was right on the money! Ended up about 0.30 mm difference from what was there from the first calibration which apparently does make a huge difference because now that I have re-calibrated my Rostock, she is printing so nice! Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside it made such a huge difference! I would like to know how I ended up with the numbers I had before I re-calibrated! I must not have been feeling good that day or something!

Since I am printing so well I decided to implement http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:87463 and I believe it came out good. I like this idea for the belt tensioner and think I will make the printed parts a nice blue to go with the colors on my Midnight Delta. Here is a pic of one of the tensioners:

[Toyguy]

Glad to hear the re-calibrate worked out so well. I'm thinking I'll recheck mine after another week or two to allow for any settling in on the machine.

Coincidentally, I am printing those tensioners right now too

[AndThenSome09]

Just printed out these owls for my wife, they came out good except for they tops o their heads.

Not sure why the picture is uploading upside down??!