I *think* i unclogged the printer correctly this time. Fingers crossed. Learned to remove the Bowden tube and use cleaning filament. Last attempt it stalled before the raft was done.
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YouTube is treacherous. Official Monoprice video shows correct procedure, but skips explaining how to remove the tube (you have to depress the blue plastic flange as I found from another video), but there's a lot of confident videos telling you to disassemble the whole damn head.
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It is truly humbling how much this very simple device can take you far beyond your sense of competence. Rheology is a bitch.
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Motors, electronics... they're conceptually simpler, and the gap between the textbook and reality is small. But when you're talking a gooey melty viscous fluid going through an extruder and then cooling and hardening on a plate.... textbook understanding doesn't get you far.
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Something I didn't realize in like 9 years of theory focused engineering school is just how much of what you need to know is basically only knowable through bug-fixing. Engineering education is 10% concepts/design/theory, and 90% bug fixing metis.
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Bugs also thoroughly violate your sense of proportions of value/investment.
- The triviality of a bug has little correlation to how long it will take you to discover/fix it. That's entirely a function of experience.
- The cost of the bug is often the value of the whole project.
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Bugs are basically insulting. They don't respect what you think you know. Only how strong your Fingerspitzengehfül for traversing the troubleshooting tree is.
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To a first approximation, your engineering ability is the number of bugs you've fixed
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ok printer seems to be working fine, though the black filament reel has run low and the filament motor seems to have some trouble pulling it now, which is probably what caused the last clog (via filament breaking)... same tension = less torque as spool radius goes down
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This is basically a bad design: a circular sleev sitting on a square shaft. I’m manually helping the feeder along a bit. Might try to design and print a better bearing.
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The play in the spool gets taken up until the tension is too high. Some interesting mechanics here.
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Ability to unearth bugs? Software engineers tell me I have an uncanny ability to go off script during testing.
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if you have an uncanny abiity, your bug-fixing number should go up much faster than average since you'll fix more bugs/unit time than others
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Bugs have compounding effects
- Non-linearly more expensive to fix later in software lifecycle
- Sum of parts is easier to fix than whole, i.e. n bugs in n distinct systems are significantly easier to fix than n bugs in one system.
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