A planned, but not planned maintenance

We always knew the barrel of the printer had problems, because we almost broke it during the assembling of the printer. One of our fiends created us a new, upgraded one long time ago, but never had the courage to replace it, because the barrel is in the middle of the printer: to reach it, we have to disassemble half of the printer. Now, it struck back - the old, almost broken, barrel finally blew out in the middle of a printing. The molten plastic flowed everywhere from the leak...

Yes, everywhere, including 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 thermistor (which had broken off from the hotendThis is where the plastic actually melted. It is part of the extruder which contains the pusher and the barrel as well. during the making too). As you can see a few millimeters of plastic covered both.

We used flame to remove the plastic from the hotendThis is where the plastic actually melted. It is part of the extruder which contains the pusher and the barrel as well. - brutal, but very effective way to do it. We didn't worry to much though, because the hotendThis is where the plastic actually melted. It is part of the extruder which contains the pusher and the barrel as well. is above 200 degrees Celsius while printing, so it couldn't have caused any problem.

The thermistor is a completely different story: although it is at the same temperature as the hotend, it is much more fragile, so we were very much worried it will break while we heating it to remove the plastic - we will tell you the result in the end.

And, of course, if we disassembled the printer, we made the necessary maintenances.

We replaced a few wires which were too thick and not too decorative to reduce the wire-chaos on the printer.

We removed the front part of the carriage, because it was not used for anything and blocked the reach 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 barrel during the daily printing, which made it hard to tell if everything is okay or not. It also helps the air flow to cool the barrel. And it was a little bit inaccurate, which caused to got stuck sometimes on the end of the X axis. We blamed that error for the often shift error if we printed on the right side, so we avoided that side of the printing plate effectively shrunken the maximum printable size, which is now 16x16x10cm after this fix.

And of course we made some cleaning on the printer, which is regularly needed.

But after four hours of work we finished the job. We were pretty much worried about the new barrel, which is a little bit different, than the old one, and never tried it yet. But we were even more worried about the thermistor... So to speak, the 3D printers are not plug-and-play yet - more like plug-and-pray. But it worked! At the first try! We already celebrated it with a cup of red wine...