I had a major crash of the Rapman 3.0 printer and for several hours I thought I was really knackered. One of the leads to a phase of the extruder stepper parted because of fatigue from thousands of hours of vibration. The system shut down and reset. At first I thought I had a simple static discharge event, the first in many months. I fired the system back up and discovered that the extruder stepper would dance around but wouldn't pump filament.
After serious prayers that the stepper driver chip for the extruder hadn't fried I rewired the connector and got the extruder pumping ABS again only to discover that the intense vibration from the stepper before the reset had actually shaken apart the Arcol extruder hot end that I had bought from László Krekács in Hungary.
This sounds worse than it was. I simply screwed it all back together and cleaned the extruder end and it worked perfectly again. Unfortunately, I will have to recalibrate Rapman now. That should take a few hours that I didn't have available today.
In any case, I was able to cobble the Prusa Mendel frame together this morning.
It's a dinky little thing, but interesting all the same.
