I will write up all that's gone on in the last few days but suffice to say its printing again and much better as well. It has a new nozzle which is the only change really since I have postponed the move to Marlin since it did not go well for me despite considerable help from Maik in Germany. I need to concentrate on other areas for the moment and the new ReplicatorG ver 33 looks good with dual extruder capacity, although it keeps crashing on me at the moment.

So I am back to standard firmware as supplied by Richard (SumPod owner and designer) with ReplicatorG (ver 29) and Skeinforge. However, the print I got today was the best yet! The only change is the development nozzle.

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I received a spool of filament form a new supplier since the printer is now working well. My initial stock of colours is being depleted so I took the plunge and ordered a 1kg pack of 1.75mm PLA clear from MakerBot industries. I decided to measure it and found the specified size was 1.75mm and that matched the micrometer reading exactly.

However this raised both a problem and an opportunity. First, how to feed the filament off the spool and secondly, to make a design that allows it to turn freely, so improving on just laying the filament down on the floor. This casual method caused a problem in the printing of two of the blocks used to make the spool holder. I left it printing two blocks and when I returned it had stopped, albeit just. The problem was the filament had caught itself and stooped feeding. I decided to let it complete the build after freeing the filament so the blocks were not 'perfect' but good enough to use to prove the concept.

Progress on the conversion from Sprinter driven software to Marlin is progressing along side the new front panel to allow the new LCD, SD card reader, speaker, keypad, click rotary encoder and a contrast button, to be fitted.  I needed a method for attaching the SD card reader so I designed and printed a bracket which is now available for downloading on Thingiverse and this will be screwed to the front panel. The card then hot glued (or another suitable glue) to the bracket (see photo below).

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Today I wanted to see how the Sumpod would do with a long print. Airtripper (Mark) very kindly pointed out where in Skeinforge I could change the settings to print multiple copies. Its under Craft, then multiply. For the direction, to print more from left to right you use rows and for front to back, columns.

It was simplicity itself so I loaded up the file and changed the number of rows to 3 and started a print with fingers crossed. It laid down the three copies and went on to print them out. The total print time was 3 hours 35 minutes. One problem however was just 20 minutes from the end I was running out of filament! So I quickly measured up another colour to make sure it was the same diameter and tried supergluing them together. The princciple behind my idea was the new filament would push through the remaining, giving me enough...or so I hoped. But it wouldn't work. So I thought I would heat one end and that worked.

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Conrad Electronic UK
Europe's leading electronic specialists now in the UK

Well today there was a mixture of result and some learning points. The first point of interest was the failure after about an hour of printing of the extrusion of filament. It just stopped and was blowing bubbles!  the answer was twofold. One, I needed to add about 10 degrees of turn on the extruder tension bolt (something I have been loath to do) and as soon as that was done it started extruding again, and secondly the filament was thinner!! To get the right setting I continued with the printing and watched the nozzle as I adjusted the tension,  to see when the filament started to flow again.

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Conrad Electronic UK
Europe's leading electronic specialists now in the UK

Well the SumPod is still printing well and I thought I would try printing something on my long list of items to print, a tool holder system for my model engineering hobby.

I got up to version 3 (which has yet to be tested) today and will have a go tomorrow in printing one out.

I have also been exploring how to print multiple copies at the same time. If you know of a better way then please let me know but my solution goes back to Alibre 3D cad and simply making an assembly with the number of copies required. I ran it through Skeinforge to see the hot end paths and it works in principle. When I get the design right I will have a go at printing 3 copies (see photo below). Whilst the second attempt did not work where it would easily slide into place, when I cut it in half to see if the jointing worked, that at least was a success.