Repairs

Following my disaster from last year, I tried to salvage what I could. For the extruder motor holder, I was able to set it on a thing with a hole and bash a hex wrench through it, popping out the stuck piece. The heat sink proved more problematic, though. I was hoping I could soften it in the oven and pull it out, but the spread-out part wouldn't budge. My next attempts were using increasingly hot oven temperatures to try to hammer it out from the other side. For this I needed something sturdy and heat-resistant I could set it in - after some searching, I noticed the steel pipe I recently got for sword swinging practice fit nicely, and could be set up in some of the drawer handles to stand upright. However, this mostly just squished the filament further together in one end. I eventually got some of it to melt out, but at this point I had bent the hex wrench, and while looking on the Internet for advice saw one important warning: Do not get the inside of the heat sink scratched! Well, I had just hammered a steel hex wrench into it several times, so at this point, rather than spending more time on trying to clean this, risking all manner of annoying problems in the future, I gave up and ordered a new one from e3d. Being the cheapskate I am, I had it shipped with Royal Mail, so I expect it'll arrive some time before New Year's.

I've considered the state of the ribbon cable and breakout PCB some more. Redesigning the PCB would be fun, but isn't really necessary at the moment. What I should do, however, is replace the cable with a fresh one, properly made. I will start by cutting a bit of extra length, attach the connectors, and test the connections before actually swapping anything out. I would like to have a few more wires around for extras, but the ribbon cable holders near the X end-stop don't have room for more. I'll just have to see if I could steal heat break fan power from the hotend itself and use wire 5 for probe signal.