08-19-2025 — Following up

Howdy all. Forecast says maybe rain this afternoon/evening. I’ll believe it after it re-fills the birdbath. But it is a lovely 74 degrees out there right now. And even the air quality has been good for yesterday and today. Window is open and Kitty is happy.

Yesterday I went out long enough to pull out all of the cucumber vines from the bed, and surrounding areas. Lots of LARGE cucumbers, and some regular and small ones too, all went into the compost bin. Here I am pulling my sled full of vines and such to the compost bin. Did that a couple times.

While I was out there, I put these in my pockets. A few purple peppers, and some of those small purplish tomatoes and a couple of almost ripe tomatoes of various shades.

I did manage to get the P1S printer to get through a full multi-color print without poo-flinging issues. But, I neglected to realize just how much waste was being created by those Gnomes.

Here is a finished Tree Gnome.

In case you think I’m overly obsessed with poop, this is a 30 gallon kitchen bag about 40% filled with the filament waste from the last 5-6 months.   I had to empty the bin on the floor behind the P1S printer because it was backing up the sewer pipe all the way up to the machine.  And the print paused.  

So, at this point, I’ve upgraded both printers with the Biqu purge fixes, and added back a chute extension piece that I tried a year ago. It sits in the middle of the chute and rises above the chute in an attempt to stop poo from getting out.

It works well in combination of the other fixes. I also sprayed a Teflon-like spray on the inside of the chutes to help stuff slide. The P1S is doing fine. The X1C, not as well. But I think part of the issue on it was the 8 color print I tried was using too high of a temperature for the PETG filaments and left it stringy when trying to change colors. The stringiness caused it to float about and stick to any other filament waste in the area, and pull it along. When it finally cooled down, the string would break off, and the poo was left wherever it fell. The stringy mess also got all over the print, causing it to fail miserably.

Notice the antlers fell off, and the strings everywhere. I trimmed tons of strings off the body before this picture.

Also notice how the entire head shifted to the right. And the tongue is pretty much destroyed. This took close to two days to complete because it kept pausing for the strings and poo everywhere. I restarted it this morning in just one color (white) and lowered the temperature some. It will take about 4 hours instead of the 8-color version’s estimate of 25 hours.

The tree-like structures you see around the print, are just that. They are to temporarily hold up pieces of the print that might stick out. Like the hands or the antlers. They easily snap off when the print is done. But notice zero stringiness so far.

It is later afternoon now. I did get a little more done. Here are pictures from the single color gnome.

Ready to be removed from printer. Notice no stringing. And the tree structures holding up the various pieces.

Notice the white filament only version is 4 times the size and it printed in 10% of the time. Those color changes chew up the clock.

The tree structures just snap off and go in the waste bucket with poo.

And you are left with this. A couple of snips are still needed to clean where the supports were. But it looks good. I don’t know if I will paint it or not.

While I was upstairs, I went into the laser room and told myself I was at least going to pretend I started on the upgrade of the Diode laser from 20watts to 40watts. Well, I did more than that. Module and accessories installed. New Power supply installed. Also updated the firmware on the machine. Then updated the Xtool software to note the new module and then update to the latest release.

I now have an xTool S1 - 40Watt machine. Ready to test.

I might have tested it out today, but was getting frustrated by all of the WinBlows updates that had to install since I last used the laptop. While some of those were going, I downloaded and installed the software which will be used by the CO2 laser. Still need to finish assembly of it. And calibrating the laser and getting the liquid cooler set up. That is coming soon to a blog near you. Until then, Enjoy Life