More tuning

A week or so ago, I decided to switch over to Skeinforge 007. Mostly because the Raftless script only works with that version.

Skeinforge being Skeinforge, it didn’t carry over all its settings and I had to manually transfer them by hand. Having said that, thanks to the built-in profiles, there was one that for the Cupcake. It seemed to work well enough, but had a few issues such as the “extrusion over” ratios not working at all for me. Infact, it would put way too much plastic which caused massive ridges and blobs. And for anyone who’s dealt with one of these machines before, the extruder tool head catches onto the excess plastic and (if you’re lucky) skips a few steps… and if you’re not too lucky, it could break/damage your retainer, or heater assembly.

I’m almost close to getting some good settings, which is a shame since I’m waiting on the new Super Pack from MakerGear which contains a 0.35mm nozzle.

I’ve also encountered a few other problems with my printer along the way. One being the X-Stage pieces warping due to the weather. The warping made it harder for the X-Stage to move towards the right (moving towards the left was fine), so I just did a quick and dirty hack and added rubber bands to hold the pieces together. In case you’re wondering, the bands were placed around the endstop notches.

On top of that, I went back to using the 1.61.8 firmware combo as I was unable to resolve the communication losses to the extruder (which causes entire extrusion segments to go missing).

So, what do I do with my new found printing abilities? I print a cup!