Tag: Spaghetti

When everything works correctly with the 3D printer you have this amazing spectacle of an object created out of thin air. This isn’t a fast process by any means, even small objects can take hours to print from start to finish. If you are imaginative you hang an old cell phone with tape to the side of the printer and use an app to take several hundred pictures of this action. (I should have taken a picture of this highly technical setup…) After all that you can create a time lapse video of the printing process like the one below:

The green thing printing in the video was a hook and bracket for mounting a cell phone on the side of the printer for taking pictures or video. It was a great idea and fit on the printer well but ended up getting in the way of the extruder as it moved along path. It looks like I’m sticking with the tape for the time being.

Now, I am not saying that our 3D printers are wonky or unreliable, they work flawlessly 90% of the time. Yet when a print does fail, it tends to fail in a spectacular way. The raft can work loose from the bed, even with blue tape put down, and create gobs of plastic spaghetti until you stop it. Sometimes a print just fails when the extruder gobs plastic in one spot melting a chunk out of your print. The pictures below are good examples of these phenomena.

At this point both of our MakerBot Replicator+ 3D Printers are working very well. They needed a little tweaking here and there but are ready to be put into full time use printing out student projects. I can’t wait to see what they will create!