#3dPrinting #keyboards

I haven’t written a post in awhile, happy new year!

My 3d printer was slated to get here tomorrow, but it arrived before the weekend. I was able to get it assembled and working by this morning. I’m excited to start printing and assembling some mechanical keyboards, some of which I will sell on the internet (more details on that in the future).

I went with the Prusa MK4 kit + enclosure after some research. It seemed like one of the best, no-fuss printers. It was expensive and the assembly instructions were good but I still messed up. I have one complaint about the instructions: they don’t tell you what to do or not to do when you have the enclosure. The enclosure instructions start with a finished printer, then you disassemble some parts and reassemble them in a way that works with the enclosure. It would be great to have a set that starts with the enclosure.

I made a mistake when assembling despite the good instructions and trying to be careful. The initial calibration failed on the y axis. The issue might have just been the bearings, but I think I had the belt holders on backwards 😳. Fixing this was a bit of a pain since I already had the printer inside the enclosure. It is possible to take it out, but I didn’t have that much room on my workbench so I had to go on the floor (my back!). You can’t take the printer all the way out of the enclosure due to the cables going to the screen.

So far everything has printed beautifully. I made a mistake by not reading and I tried using PTEG in a PLA print and that failed horribly but the PLA prints look really nice. I’m excited to keep learning more about this and modding my printer. I want to add an IP cam to my network to spy on my prints. Right now I’m using my iPod touch and PrusaConnect but there is no way to get the image feed in PrusaLink, or at least not without some hacking.

If you have any models you like please leave a webmention or hit me up on the fediverse.