The Strange Case of the Broken Hotend

X Axis Assembly

My fears were grounded - the wires to the hotend fell off. Need to get a new one, I guess. On the left side (taken from below), the thermistor wires are top-right and bottom-right, and the hole for the hotend itself is on the bottom-left. On the right picture, a lost hotend connector.

Fastened the extruder on the carriage. For lack of wing nuts, I used normal nylocs and a long pair of pliers:

The sideways mounting of the connector on the X motor got in the way. When I tried to move it to live on the top, it turned out FabLab has no PZ1 screwdriver or bit that isn't horribly stripped. So for now the connector still lives on the side, but I need to remove it if I am to remove the extruder:

Adding the fan was a bit fiddly at first, then suddenly easy. Probably by way of bending the thermistor cables.

I lasercut a little piece of wood to trigger the X microswitch before crashing the wing nuts of the extruder into the X axis bearings. My machine now has duct tape on it, as is proper:

The fan connectors from my extruder are wrong, they have red and black on the outer sides of the plug, not lining up with the markings on the X motor connector.

PSU Assembly

The PSU wires are a bit shorter than required, some from previous cuttage, some just from the way they were. A lot of the wires are really thick, I may have trouble getting them into the Melzi (PZ2 bit for scale):

Also, there were fewer wires than expected, but a bonus white one that I have no idea what's for. The yellow wire has a lot of heatshrink on it because I had the piece too close when soldering the tip and it shrank right there. BTW: German for heatshrink is "Schrumpfschlauch" (I kid thee not), but I like to call it "Schlumpfschlauch".

I misread the instructions for the 4R7 and put green on one end and black on the other at first. This gave me the opportunity to try out the solder removal tool that's the right-hand part of the solder box. Worked incredibly well. If I am ever going to salvage stuff again, or just want better soldering irons at home, I want this.

All in all, good progress (except, of course, the hotend). I really hope it's easily replaceable.