Topic: These machines are TOUGH
So there was a fire in our home lab in October. This fire was NOT 3D printer related, and no animals or people were hurt. Our house is even fine, as our lab space was a shipping container next to the house, and the fire didn't breach the exterior. The whole experience was more like opening the (cool) door at 10am, and finding smoke, black covering everything, with severe damage to one desk. What does this have to do with Solidoodles?
All of my electronics gear, hand tools, three Solidoodle 4s, one delta, and one home-built coreXY frankenprinter with a Solidoodle Z stage were in there, along with all of my spare parts and the bits needed to reassemble my i3 and my mendelmax. Oof.
I learned something about fire: When it doesn't directly burn something, it rusts the crap out of it, even when I lubricated it in the past. My hand tools got hit pretty bad with soot and rust on oxide-coated components, but my printers...
on two Solidoodles, all six rods were rusted, all bearings showed rust, and every oxide-coated fastener was rust. The delta's rails, carriages, magballs, and fasteners were the same. If it wasn't stainless, it rusted.
This kills the printer.
Weirdly, the SD4 -frames- were good, and the third SD4 had somehow only gotten rust on the Z rods and all the bearings and fasteners. (I swear I kept them lubricated. :B) Side and top panels only show rust where the embers burned the paint off, too. But the insides were also completely coated in a fine, toner-like ash that smelled to high heaven and required acts of God to remove (I still can't get all of it off the SD4 frames, ugh!).
I'm a terrible story writer, but the part I really wanted to share was this:
(please ignore my terrible bed adhesion, this is my first print in a long while haha)
after all the evenings and weekends I've spent since the fire cleaning and reconditioning equipment, I finally got the first SD4 fully operational again. Feels good, even if my bedroom is my lab now for the time being.
Also, a huge mountain of gratitude to Filastruder, who still happens to sell all the bits I need to reclaim my damaged Titan extruders and pretty much the entire delta printer's motion parts. I love that thing almost as much as I love the printer I just finished fixing, haha
tl;dr - Fire ate my stuff, rebuilding everything sucks. Fire is weird. Rust sucks.
