Upgrading our printer

The first change we have made is to remove the stress from the main board by installing relays to switch the circuit of the hotendThis is where the plastic actually melted. It is part of the extruder which contains the pusher and the barrel as well. and heated bed. We have been testing the relay controlled hotendThis is where the plastic actually melted. It is part of the extruder which contains the pusher and the barrel as well. for several prints right now and we haven't experienced any problem so far.

But we have a serious problem - we need another power supply, because our current one is strong enough to support only the hotendThis is where the plastic actually melted. It is part of the extruder which contains the pusher and the barrel as well. and the motors. The heated bed requires more then it can provide, so it wouldn't work. We though an old PC supply will be strong enough, but it turned out our very old power supply couldn't support the hotendThis is where the plastic actually melted. It is part of the extruder which contains the pusher and the barrel as well. alone! So we had to order a new, much stronger power supply which we'll pick up tomorrow. It should solve the power problem.

Not so soon we plan to move to the next step: the heated bed itself! It'll help to eliminate the double sided tape need for printing which causes several problems (eg. the bottom of the print is not smooth, rather like a shape of a barrel). We can use glass plate with a special tape instead. It is a very high-tech tape, used by the NASA, which is heat-resistant and the hot plastic sticks to it easily. And it is usable both for PLA and ABS - and the ABS is much easier to handle than the very hard and rigid PLA.

At first, we wanted to use aluminium as a plate, but we had to realize we couldn't make it smooth enough to print on it. So we switched to glass instead, although it was much harder to get one which fits on the printer. Obviously we couldn't take a picture of the glass, but here is one about the size of the heated bed. However it won't be easy to install it on the printer - we have a plan and we try to make as many pictures as we can during the process to document our efforts.