Equipment/Makerbot Cupcake

We have a Makerbot Cupcake (batch 9, #402)! It's cool.

If you haven't used it before, please contact Russ and get him to show you how it works.

If you're using the Makerbot and have issues with it, or have to do maintenance/modifications to it, please note them in the logbook below. This lets other users know what the state of the machine is.

Logbook

04/02/2010 Operator: Russ

• Walked in, started it up, extruder works fine.
• Extruder idler pulley needed re-adjusting twice. (Note: that the thin silvery metal bar in the Makerbot toolkit is designed to be used as a spacer for this.) Should be done up nice and tight now though.
• Continual tweaking of z-stage stepper strength, now at about 75%
• Accidental Z-stage/build platform collision required re-levelling of Z-stage (seems the best way to do this is by releasing one of the Z idler pulleys and twisting the studding, instead of fiddling with the nuts). Seems pretty smooth now.
• X belt tension was too low, there was a lot of slop. It's pretty tricky to get it tight enough.
• Lots of bolts on the XY stage were loose! This makes a horrendous racket when it's actually printing at full speed... Tightened them up
• Packed both X runner bars with hot glue, they were also moving about and making a racket.
• I managed to make it print 1/3rd of a shot glass, then it crashed. (About 60,000 gcode commands/30mins in.) Need to know what firmware to put on it to stop the crashing.

Following changes over skeinforge 0006 defaults are active (on my laptop):

 Feedrate: 27.0 mm/s
 Base Layer Thickness over Layer Thickness:  1.5
 Interface Layer Thickness over Layer Thickness: 0.8