Terrible day: Moved the printer to clean the desk.

3D Printing
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Terrible day:
Moved the printer to clean the desk. Managed to somehow break the short leg on the Z axis endstop holder to splinters. Tried to fix it MacGyver style with a rubber band (no real forces on that part anyway) to print out a replacement but didn’t get the bed height calibration correct. Tried to fix this by manually adding G1 Z0.05 F100 followed by G92 Z0 in the right spot in the GCode file, which for some reason caused the hot end to plunge an extra centimeter down onto the bed and absolutely shred the kapton tape diagonally from origo to and through the whole skirt before I managed to kill it.

I have no spare kapton tape and only ABS filament. I could make do with some ABS juice on the glass until I get a delivery of new kapton tape I guess, but how would I source a new endstop holder if I can neither print one (not able to reliably home Z) nor fix the mangled bits I have? Is it time to pick out the wood working tools?

How do you fix your breaking printers? Do you keep a full set of printable replacement parts ready just-in-case?

Link is to the stl of the end-stop holder I’m now sadly lacking.
https://github.com/prusajr/PrusaMendel/blob/master/metric-prusa/endstop-holder.stl

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I’m not in a position to help, but I notice, like Facebook lacking a ‘dislike’ button, Google needs a -1 button.

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I would just ziptie the endstop like this

Slowly move it with your hands, get it as close to the bed slowly and then adjust the bed to close the gap.

Also, couldn’t you just abs slurry the endstop together?

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@Mike_Miller you dislike the post, or you just feel for the guy?

@Hannes_Lilliefeldt , I think it is possible to disable in your firmware the “stop on Z endstop”, so you could roughly set the Z home by manually pressing the endstop, jog the axis down by .1mm until it’s where you want, then tell the controller that you’ve reached the new zero position (“G92 Z0” I think), and remove the homing command from your start gcode. Someone who has actually done this may be able to give you better step by step instructions though.

As far as printing ABS on glass, I don’t even bother with kapton now, and just put ABS slurry down on the glass (usually as the bed is heating, around 40C), heat to 100C, then print.

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Hot glue, CA, epoxy.

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I’d be happy to print one of these for you in PLA (I only have a PrintrBot Simple) and ship it to you. Would take a while to get there, obviously. Send me a “hangout” if you’d like me to print one.
EDIT: I’m in USA, BTW.

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@Tony_Olivo I feel for him. I’m waiting on a replacement controller…

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I’m an advocate of the macguyver approach. Hot glue, screws, tape and so on. I’ve rescued extruders and end stop mounts in this way over the years. I now keep spares for most of my printer’s critical components (like extruders and endstops mounts) . This is only after burning hours and hours having to kludge a solution for a broken part.

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Make sure your z-axis is disabled between layers in marlin. Generate some extra priming loops when you slice the model. As the machine homes manually actuate the z-endstop when you get close. Once the print beguns manually turn the z-rods to adjust the height of the first layer. The extra priming loops should give you the time to get a good first layer height.

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Yeah, a z stop is not critical equipment, you can do without.

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Thanks for the kind words, everyone! Sometimes that is all that is needed to get that MacGyver solution working and… now I have a replacement endstop holder hot off the printer :smiley: