RepRap: Some more problems, but first water-tight mini mug!

That's too bad. I thought I was almost done.

With the 100nF capacitor it worked better. Now I still have the problem that it more or less stops heating in cycles when the power setting is very high.

Now, the hot nichrome wire just disconnected because the solder had gone fluid. I had a heatsink on top at first to prevent the heat going up too much, but removed it because I thought it sunk too much heat for HDPE to even become soft enough to extrude. That was not it, but for now I've left it without the heatsink.

Perhaps I'm printing with a bit of a difficult material (HDPE). I need pretty high temperatures, otherwise either the PTFE rod is pushed out of the clamp or the motor hardly rotates or the screw doesn't grab the fillament well enough to push it through.

Update: This happened twice now, now I've fixed it with steel wire that I've twisted to tighten it around the fillament/screw holder and a newly installed hose-clamp.

When I use the nozzle wipe function in the 0.8.3 host software I got a weird appendix to my objects:
[attachment 755 Appendix.jpg]

This (see photo on the right) happens after returning from the nozzle wipe, just before the first outline. When it starts with the outline, it starts at a slightly off position at first. For different layers, the time to restore takes a different time (not with the objects in this photo, but I've seen it). At first I thought it was a communications error, because of the previous, but when I changed the NozzleWipeStroke to 0 (it was 15) the odd behaviour was gone. This was also key to my first nearly-water-tight mini-mug. I had a quick toast because the contents were leaking out very slowly, but it was very good. Here I am, proud of this result!

Here's the time lapse of how I made it:

One more thing: I extrude on plain MDF and use hair spray and sandpaper the adjust the stickyness. This works really well! The hair spray reduces stickyness (and so do previous prints) but sanding down a bit will increase the stickyness. As you'll see in the print is that it lets go at the last few layers, the print is good enough to toast on