Got my 3Doodler today – between my most recent experience with nozzle enlargement, and my playing with hand-feeding of the 3Doodler “extruder”, I have come to better appreciate the relationship between plastic flow rate and extruder feed rate.
And, I’ve developed a greater appreciation for the early RepRappers that obtained great prints!
(Unboxing pics at http://toybuilderlabs.com/blog/2013/10/29/got-our-3doodler)
There really is no substitute for hands on experience, is there.
I’m sure that even the long-time printer operators will develop a new greater appreciation for bridging, overhangs, adhesion, stringing and so on by playing with this (or any hand-held extruder) for 5 to 10 minutes.
I had several aha moments when I started playing with this!
Did you see the same kind of occasional but periodic pauses I did?
Yeah, I had a few pauses, it seemed to happen mostly when drawing with the nozzle in contact with “the ground”. In-air extrusions generally seemed to not have any problems, although the retract/prime duration were sufficiently varied that this would not make for a good true 3d printer extruder.