08-18-2025 — Less Procrastinated

Howdy all. If it weren’t for the fact that we need rain a lot, it would be a lovely day. Temps around 62 to start the day, headed to mid 70s. Even the air quality is in the good zone. I should water the tomato plants and the peppers that are left, but I really don’t care at this point. This garden season was a dry-out (not a wash-out).

I finally applied the Biqu Panda Purge upgrades to the two 3D printers. The results are mixed. I am still getting purge poop issues on both printers. Not as much on the P1S that I use for PLA filament, but it has another issue I’ll explain in a bit. The X1C Carbon printer is still clogging its poop chute sometimes, and tossing the poop (spaghetti) onto the build plate, which the sensor sees and pauses the prints. I have one last thing I can try. I once tried an extension clip-on piece to the inside of the chute, but that didn’t solve the clinging onto the extruder issue. The Biqu upgrade seems to handle that well, so I am going to try the clip-on after this round of prints end.

Anyway, here are some pictures and more explanation of what is failing.

If you look towards the back of the picture, you can see a little yellow vertical line. That is the filament coming out of the extruder, headed into the poop chute. You can see, barely, the upgrades. There is a new super slippery pad on the inside of the chute - notice the different shading. And there is a new set of silicone brushes , those things that look sort of whitish gray on the right side of the chute. Those brushes wipe off any remaining poop, as the extruder head leaves the area.

Those updates worked fairly well. But, the printer setup decided it wasn’t happy to pull in the yellow filament. At first I thought it might be the filament itself. Initially, a foot long piece broke off inside one of the 3 foot tubes it travels to get from the 4-color AMS unit, to the printer. I had to replace the tube since there was no way to get to the stuck piece. I also replaced the yellow filament roll with a fresh one, just it case it was the issue.

Didn’t help at all, every 2 or 3 times the yellow was used, it would fail to get fully loaded. After a frustrating night, I came up with the idea of trimming the length of the tube by about 8-9 inches. The yellow was now getting into the machine, reluctantly.

It might be the spool itself that is the problem. If you can see, the spool with the yellow (a different brand than the rest), is not touching the rollers as well as the other 3 color rolls are. I think that is causing it to not react as well to the motors that are programmed to push/pull the filament through the entry up front.

I am running a new print now, and it has gone about 14 hours and other than one time where I pushed the poop down the chute manually, it has not fail. But this print doesn’t use yellow.

This is from the camera in the printer. If you look at the poop chute, you can see some stuck in the chute. Hopefully it will fall when the weight gets to be enough.

This is the other printer. The X1C Carbon. I started this print later afternoon yesterday. It stopped a few times for spaghetti on the plate, or clogged chute issues. Has restarted fine after manually clearing plate or chute.

Perfect example of what I wrote just happened. This is the printer’s camera. Notice a pile of spaghetti (poop) is sitting on the plate. If that gets in the sensor’s view, the print will pause and I will have to go upstairs to remove it.

This is one of the 6 Santa Ducks that was on the P1S printer. Took about 16 hours to print them because of the hundreds of color swaps. As many as 4 colors on one layer. Approximately 500 layers of .2 mm. Each color swap takes up to 2 minutes to unload one color, load a new one, and purge the remaining filament in the extruder to ensure only the new color is printing.

If I can get these printers going as close to perfect as possible, I will get started getting the laser engraver/cutters upgraded (or finished installed) and tested soon.

Then I can get creating and Enjoy Life.