Day One thoughts on the Prusa Mini
It finally came!
I preordered the machine the weekend it launched in October, and it arrived Monday morning after being FEDex’ed from the factory Friday. Assembly wasn’t too bad, but it was not as quick as easy as I was expecting.. the documentation was missing a couple of pages, and getting that first long screw in place was… well, you can check out the unboxing stream yourself and watch me wrestle with it for 20 minutes, if you are into that sort of sadistic endeavor.
Off to… a start?
As you see in the video, after the initial assembly, it seemed to do what it said on the box. The first print came out alright! Subsequent prints had no such luck.
Not too shabby for a first test print!
Prints two, three, four, and five had no such luck, unfortunately.
Enter the internet to save the day!
As it was approaching 2am and I had an early meeting, I decided to go to bed and research what could possibly be wrong the next day. Fortunately, I pretty much figured all of it out with a couple quick searches during lunch. One forum user in particular, Bobstro was really instrumental on the first layer calibration and adhesion issues, and Prusa must have been aware of the mechanical adjustments that may be needed because they had all the tweaks on one pretty clear page.
I tried to the video overview pretty quick and to the point, but if you are super impatient it breaks down basically as:
Adhesion: Clean the bed. Clean it good, and don’t touch it again. And don’t just use Alcohol initially, use Dawn dish soap to get your paw grease off of that thing.
First layer Calibration: The built-in routine is whack. Use the Live Z file in the links below instead.
Mechanical Issues: My hotend was too low and not fully set in the heat sink; loosening a few screws and making a quick adjustment worked wonders; also my idler screw was cranked super tight. I lightened that up a touch, and all was well.
3 quick little tweaks took about 15 minutes once I knew what I was looking for, and now it is just cranking out great prints without any issues!
Credits / Links:
Bobstro from the prusa forums runs an amazing blog/wiki resource thing and he solved my calibration and adhesion issues with these following links: http://projects.ttlexceeded.com/3dprinting_live_z_calibration.html http://projects.ttlexceeded.com/3dprinting_bed_adhesion.html
As for the mechanical issues: Detailed documentation lives on the Prusa Help Site: https://help.prusa3d.com/article/e6tym5n457-clicking-extruder-mini
Though this video is what clued me in initially: https://youtu.be/l8eoFsOJelg
The Cali Cat! by Dezign https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1545913
