11 November 2025
Definitely making progress ...
Although with little hiccups. Such as not noticing that the Bowden tube bolt had worked loose, so a print of the 3DBenchy in red failed about an hour in. It's running again and has about 30 minutes to go, but it's looking as good as the black one I printed yesterday. I've printed a couple of spool mounts in black as well, and will run a red set next, followed by white ones. Colour coordinated with the filament, and I just need a box now to put them in with some fresh desiccant to keep them dry. The cheap shop around the corner has one just the right size for under a fiver which is a lot better than the £45 of a fully assembled one on eBay.
I've figured out the best way to ensure that the 3D printer bed is level left to right and I can tweak it by simply manually turning the left hand X lead-screw even with the power on. So perhaps I do need to check the current being provided by the stepper drivers on the X5SA controller. Having leveled the base as best I can, there is still a slight hump in the middle of the bed, but I think it will only be a problem if I want to do large prints with a 0.2mm nozzle, and I think this is unlikely. I can run stuff up to 12cm square without it being a problem. Having finally wrangled the first layer calibration under control, I've managed to create the 9 pad test file which will help keep this under control, but I have yet to get a totally clean print off as yet. Very close but not perfect. Having leveled the bed, the next step is a baseline print and THAT came off even better than I expected. The latest cooling nozzle does seem to be performing well, and the temperature tower test also came off very respectably and for the black filament 210 degrees seems optimum, although 200 very close as well.
Spent an hour this morning playing with the remaining niggles on the website code. Fisheye Gallery for the calibration stuff is now displaying better, and the gallery above has been sorted to actually link to the sub galleries. The various styles of gallery do need further work and I've tidied 'autoflow' so it now works well across all display sizes, with it now showing 4 panels across my high res monitor. This is the one area where a move to Bootstrap 5 may be worth the effort, but one step at a time. I still have a few more loose ends to pick up on Bootstrap 3 which will help.
The pictures of the Allen Keys in the calibration gallery have been a fun area. I am STILL finding even more in the odd boxes I'm sorting through and there are a lot more now in the general box than shown in the picture. Given the time it takes to print the 3D models, I've been tidying a lot of stuff up in between setups and am doing well creating a clean tool set. Just need to find things like the hacksaws. There is probably a large one in the garage, but there should be a couple of small ones around which I've not located yet. Trying to keep purchases to a bare minimum, but I've ordered a set of blades for the Parkside jigsaw as the ones supplied are rather limiting. Also ordered a pack of 3mm MDF so I can do a bit more work on the laser cutter while the big extrusion prints are running. Next job is to sort out creating gcode files for the laser on the linux desktop rather than dropping back to the W11 box, which is really a little slow for the job, and that is the reason that it can't be updated to W11 which I don't really need abyway. #
3DBenchy in red finished, so load up for the spool holder in red and get out for my morning walk ...