Good morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am inching forward to a stop on my current long-term project. Let’s get started!
I finally added a hole for the lamp base in my model. The pegs for the screws still aren’t in there, but I have made accommodation for their addition. I started with an cylinder object and scaled to the correct sizes. I positioned it in the optimal spot to get a visual proof of concept, but I eventually remodeled it to have a better number of vertices. My model is still on a 4 way symmetry, so I needed it to be divisible by 4; and the screw posts need to be on a symmetry of 3, so it needs to be divisible by 3 as well. I already had 40 points to merge, so it needed to be at least 40. Therefore: I gave it 48 points around the approximated circle and made some loop cuts accordingly.
I made a plan to start prototyping, but I noticed something. Sometime during the week, I arranged my Blender window to cover both my screens and set up my small screen to display different wire frame views of my project. I noticed on one of these views that something I did caused some of the loop cuts used for keeping edges sharp even with the subdivision modifier to go slightly out of alignment, and a face normal appeared facing inward along such an edge. I think it was a rounding error or something. Annoyed, I told Blender to remove doubles and I resharpened the edges.
Another incident while modeling happened in the way I added the hole in the bottom of my “house.” Before, it was a simple grid. I just scaled it down, then stretched the corresponding edges to meet the corresponding point on the model cylinder-cone. (I think I may have modeled that a little incorrectly as well, scaling the Z axis alone when I should have just scaled along the edges themselves. Good thing I kept the progress in an old layer.) I ended up with a squished grid and ugly quad geometry… and eventually some unacceptable triangles. By the time I noticed, it was too late in terms of actions to undo my remove doubles command, so I ended up removing bits of the squished grid and replacing it with some much simpler geometry.
I approved my own mesh for prototyping and pulled in a new cylinder and applied a Boolean modifier so I’d only print the ring for a test fit. (Another stay thought: the power cord would have also had issues with the ring I was making.) After catching myself from accidentally sending the .stl file directly to the printer, I went to the slicer and had to go around a few times to figure out the scale. I ended up making a unit cube and figuring the correct scale is about 5BU (Blender Units) to 1 cm, and I am working on a centimeter scale.
Finally, I got the test print to the printer, and I had the drippy white filament again. It didn’t start extruding again, and the raft started separating on the first set of passes when it was supposed to stick to the (absent part of the) outline. It curled on me. I reduced the extrusion temperature by ten degrees and tried again, only to have stuff curl on me on the next, tighter layer.
At this point, I’m thinking I will need to put this project on hold until I can properly fix my printer. It’s not working as intended, and I don’t know what to do with it.
Final Question: What in the world is going on with my printer not starting extrusion right away for the initial outline?