I'm also thinking about the QU-BD and Lawsy's kit.  Anyone else out there able to print the bed mounting kit and ship it to me at a reasonable price?  I'm anxious about the power supply upgrade step -- it's a little outside my comfort zone.  But as I close in on a full month of downtime to replace a single part that died after only a couple of weeks of use, maybe it's time to take the leap.  Doesn't seem like I can count on Solidoodle, anyway.

Edit: Belay that -- since they had me send the whole bed back, it's not an option anyway.  At least that saves me agonizing over how much of Lawsy's mod looks beyond my comfort zone.

In the mean time I think I am just going to a QU-BD and see if I can get Lawsy's bed mounting kit and spacer printed out somehow.

The amount of down time is really starting to rack up due to all these hardware failures.

It's great that it's only costing me the $14 I spent on postage (that was a waste, paying that much for two-day mail for a process that's going to end up taking three weeks), but I wish they'd've given me a more realistic idea of what to expect, instead of explicitly misleading me.

All this time I've been worried about how hard it would be to replace... if I had realized that the "leveling" screws are actually all that holds the bed on, I would have looked at this ages ago.  So now I have the bed off.

Just waiting to hear about whether they want me to send the whole assembly (insulation, heating element, aluminum plate, and Kapton), or to peel them apart.  The heating bed looks to be stuck on that aluminum plate pretty darned hard, and I wonder if I can remove it without damaging it.  Which wouldn't matter since it's broken, except Solidoodle intends to return it for a refund from their supplier, and if it's got gouges in it from me manhandling it, that might be harder for them.

Hope I get an answer in time to make today's mail collection, though that's not far off.  I'm so impatient because I have like five designs queued up to print!

The 12V measurement was at the point where the power supply goes into the circuit board.

TiM

And reassuring about the soldering too, but I'm going to hold off to see what Solidoodle Support recommends after I can get home and test the resistance on the heating element before I dig any deeper into this approach.

But even if I don't do the heating bed replacement mod now, I greatly appreciate the explanation about it, and I'll keep it in mind for some later point, after I "level up" a few more times

I do need to get around to learning what extruder settings to use for PLA and how to switch between it and ABS without making a huge mess of both, but that's also something that can wait a bit.

I then had a piece of glass clipped to the top.. then I printed the bed mods, and added them to a new much thinner piece of MDF and used that as a bed base.

And you can use PLA on kapton or blue painters tape btw - just use a cold bed or only heat it to 60°C

EDIT; as an aside, you'd probably be safe doing the soldering on something like a Dell PSU... they are designed for high heat and high current where you are soldering... you could probably use a Gas Axe to solder it and still not harm the damn things ! But I totally get your trepidation none the less! Just wanted to include that you'd actually have little chance of killing something due to heat on a heavy duty power supply...

I'm curious about your comment about using MDF though.  You mean you use a piece of MDF as an unheated print bed instead of the glass, and you're able to print ABS on it well enough to print lawsy's bed mods?  This is the first I've heard of using MDF at all.  When you commented about printing temporarily, what flashed into my mind was "maybe that'd be the time to finally experiment with printing PLA", not the idea of using neither Kapton nor glass for the bed.  Time to search the forum for yet another new topic!