It's arrived... But...

it seems that it is a piece of the back of the print carriage .. not good...

If it is the older design, it is the bottom of the right hand carriage that slides back and forth on the y axis. Definitely open it and inspect for other damage before sending them an email so you can take a picture and see if there will be more that needs replaced or fixed. Sorry bout your luck. Another week or two and you might've avoided this.

all things considered they should be using injection molded parts for the cost aspect and quality though i do know they use this meathod to illustrate their wares and ts convenient for design changes. but ptinting is laborious

Their posting for mechanical engineer position asked for experience with injection molding.  I suspect there are barriers related to expertise and tooling costs that they will need to overcome first.  At least they can iterate the design with the printer before committing to a mold.

Why not have them professional printed by another company so it looks more like an injection molded part. I would think that could keep the cost down, but have a better product.

Hello Folks,
Thanks for your thoughts and comments.

I've now returned home and have been able to properly unpack the printer, identifying the broken part(s).

It's the top part of the right-hand axis rail carriage.

Although it should be a quick fix, I'm amazed at how weak and poorly designed this printed part is. It's not just the part that broke off - the tabs that hold the bolts connecting the belt are also needlessly thin - a problem compounded by the torsional stress imposed by the way the bolts are attached to the belt.

I can understand the desire to save plastic, but even to a non-engineer, it is obvious that this component (which is supporting the weight of the printing carriage and rails) was going to fail during shipping.

Hopefully this is one of the parts that has been 'redesigned' in newer models.

Unfortunately this breakage has meant that the whole printer head and one of the axis rails has been hanging by the belt for an extended period of time, which can't have done it much good.

Unfortunately that isn't the only damage - two of the extruder plastic layers have snapped in one corner (shown above).

I don't quite understand how this could have been caused by shipping abuse, as this part wouldn't have been subjected to any additional stress. My guess would be that it happened during production and wasn't noticed before shipping.

I'll be passing these photos on to support shortly to get recommendations before attempting any repairs.

I believe the rail plastic can be repaired easily with some superglue (and later replaced with a better-designed printed part), but I'm not sure about the layered extruder parts.

That is the new design, hopefully you've contacted solidoodle so they can see they need to keep tinkering with the design.  I think they should get some cardboard braces custom designed to use during shipping, would take care of a lot of these problems.  Mine also came with a cracked piece that I superglued back together and it's been working fine for over a month of printing most days. 

I'm not sure without looking at the part more closely, but just because you can print it doesn't mean it can be made from a mold, you have to think about how the negative of the mold steel has to be and how the part would come out of there, even on a split mold.  But I think in keeping with the spirit of 3d printing they would take heat if they didn't print their own plastic components.

Couldn't resist.

They will take care of you and get you printing but there is no warranty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injection_molding

i'm familiar with castign and molding (experience with arts and sculpture) the molds would be soemwhat expinsive tos tar if they used metal however they would be able to supply the STL files they use to print to mahine the molds so thats a large portion there. i found a cost estimater

http://chinaplastic.org/moldcalc_input.asp

as a test a part thats 1 inch by 2 inches by .75 inches with 4 inclusions/cavities
the mold woudl cost approximately 1681 usd with a per parts cost of 52 cents per part

so the question is how much a mold could cost how ironic would it be for china to be makign the parts to put them out of buisiness?

Proper injection moulding uses really expensive tooling. You normally wouldn't bother unless you were going to be making tend of thousands of parts. There is no way it is financially viable.

There is also quite an art to designing suitable parts. Shrinkage is a major factor and can ruin many parts if not factored in. Solid shapes do not work very well because of this. The part must be designed to only need a two part (male/female) mould, otherwise tooling skyrockets. Designing injection moulded parts in difficult, designing good ones is an art.

Alternatively, benchtop injection moulding which I imagine Jonathan does would probably be suitable for their application. Tooling can be made from a variety of materials and the parts will still come out a lot faster than 3D printing. Intelligent part design will still be paramount, but it is affordable to develop a design idea with prototypes and retool until it works.

http://www.injectionmolder.net/

John from Solidoodle came back to me very quickly last night and has promised to dispatch replacement part(s) as soon as possible.

I gave the (temporarily clamped) printer a quick run through the axis and brief extrusion using the Standard Solidoodle software, which all appears to otherwise be working fine.

I've repaired and left the piece clamped/setting today so I can play with the printer further tonight.