Sometimes when I look at my 3D printer, I feel like it has become a classic sports car, where the car never goes far without breaking down and is always being adjusted or fixed. Parallels to Top Gear quotes about old Alfa Romeos come to mind.

While waiting for the parts to fix the printer I took my Raspberry Pi that I was using and reformatted with the latest Raspbian and Octopi, I rearranged my workspace to access my Turnigy printer and my big printer.

Tinkering time… The aluminum (MK3) heated bed was great and the warm up times in summer might have been acceptable, but now that it is winter it just takes too long to heat up (The room temperature has quite an effect). So I changed back to the PCB (MK2) style bed I now see that it was an error to change so many things at one time. But having said that I am also interested to see if improvements I have made trying to get the MK3 bed working will help the MK2 bed heat up faster.

The stepper motor finally arrived and I put everything together and just as I finished re-calibrating everything I saw the gear wheel stutter. While checking closer I found that the gear wheel I printed as a back up spare was deformed!

This changes everything, at this point I needed to reconsider what to do.

After toggling all the pros and cons, I came to the conclusion that my extruder might be the equivalent of Betamax against VHS or HD DVD against Blu-ray and that I might want to convert my extruder to be a Bowden type extruder and switch to 1.75 mm filament.

I then realized it would take several more weeks to carry out but now my direct drive extruder was not working as it should, so I need to do something.