I recently replaced the belts on my Lulzbot Mini. What started off as a simple bit of work ballooned into somewhat more serious work because of a few mistakes I made. The Lulzbot Mini being open source – along with Lulzbot’s excellent documenation – made the repairs possible.
Continue reading Why I Buy Open Source PrintersTag Archives: Lulzbot Mini
Adding Heat-Set Inserts to your 3D Printed Parts
It’s time again for me to replace a couple 3D printed pieces of my Lulzbot Mini printer, so I’ve captured the details here of melting heat-set inserts into PETG 3D printed parts.
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Debugging 3D Printer Thickness Errors
I recently found my 2016 Lulzbot Mini 3D printer wasn’t printing the sides of models accurately: when I tried to print a box and lid pair, the lid was too small to fit the box. This error worried me, because the last time that problem happened it was the fault of stress fractures in the Y carriage supports, which took a lot of time and money to repair.
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Extruder gear tension: the overlooked adjustment
I used to think that 3D Printer extruder tension – how much pressure the extruder hobbed gear exerts on the filament to move it forward – was a pretty forgiving thing. At one extreme, there’s “so loose the filament doesn’t feed” and on the other, there’s “so tight the extruder motor binds”. I thought everything in between was ok.
My assumption was confirmed each time I read advice on how to tune a misbehaving printer: people rarely mentioned extruder tension.
My recent fight to fix a bad print taught me that incorrect extruder tension can make a huge difference in your print quality after all.
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Testing Your 3D Printer’s First Layer Height Calibration
One of the last steps of assembling a Prusa i3 MK3 3d printer is to manually adjust the Z height. As I adjusted my printer’s Z height, I began to wonder what the Z height calibration looked like on my older printer, a Lulzbot Mini. At the same time, I became curious about what size that Lulzbot Mini can print. A simple test print answered both questions.
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