An upgrade

The last post showed the broken foot pedal on our bio garbage can. I managed to epoxy it back on, but because it was so cold where I did it, the epoxy didn't fully set (and ran over the support so I had to cut through it), and within a month of further stepping, it broke off again. No saving it this time.

My printer has mostly been standing still, partly due to my own carelessness, partly due to parts failure. I neglected to level properly before a big print and ended up with so much backpush that the filament stripped, then the rest of the filament in the hotend oozed out. This resulted in stuckness that couldn't be resolved with a cold pull, because there just wasn't enough heating up going on. In the end I took the cooling part of the hotend off and placed it on a toaster (flatbed style, known as "Deathtrap" to non-Danes) until the filament became soft enough to pull. This bought me a bit more printing time before the aforementioned cracks reappeared, and I'm not going to try to re-glue that piece. Fortunately, I had printed another extruder block, which I'm now cleaning of excessive elephant's foot before mounting. I also tried, for extra reinforcement, to apply some contact cement to the side of the block. I imagine it can seep in through tiny cracks and bind it together a bit. Would be interesting to compare epoxy and various glues not for bonding two parts, but for reinforcing one.

In the meanwhile, I have turned 50 (who'd have thunk?), and in that connection my wife arranged a Christmas and birthday gift conspiracy to get me a new printer. Enough money came in to get me a Prusa i3 mk3s, and maybe also the MMU. It should just barely fit in my workbench. While the Mendel90 has been good, it has also suffered from some build problems and limited upgradability. The rest of the world has moved on, and getting proper bed levelling, motor feedback, a large print volume, a better plate, and many more improvements will allow me to focus more on the design part than on maintaining the printer. I will probably still keep the old one around (somewhere) for when I need more printing done quickly, but my day-to-day printing should be easier with the Prusa.