Thursday, August 4, 2016
Yesterday evening we saw the interesting tv report that SuperQuark dedicated to WASP (VIDEO HERE) and Shamballa project. It’s just a pity that it was recorded so we couldn’t include current images from the camp: the wall, in fact, has already passed the high of 2 meters, and printing is going on.
In moments like these we often remind all the problems we faced every day. For example when we had to change the skids because, for the consumption, they had eroded the machine tool and blocked the work. We had to plan a new skid, but every cloud has a silver lining considering that afterwards the machine doubled the printing speed.
Then, passed 2 meters, we faced new difficulties. To load up we needed to reach at least 3 meters. We tried every kind of pump, but nothing seemed to work: the mixture was too solid to be pumped in. So we bought a scaffolding and an elevator, connected the elevator to the scaffolding and found out that this is the best solution to load the material.
However, there was still a problem: what if the material ends when the extruder is far from the point of loading (and it always happens)? Luckily Dennis worked it out by inserting a position of loading in the firmware and a new command in the machine menu. Pretty easy, right? By pushing the voice “load material” the extruder reaches us in the exact point where we need to load it. Thanks Dennis!
Now we can easily reach 4 meters high. We doubled the printing speed, we removed the blockage in the extruder, we improved the materials. It looks like there are not big difficulties ahead: printing goes on.
