RepRap update

My MakerGear printer is sold - a guy at work bought it to be placed in his family's hardware store. He says they'll be doing custom printing for people but it sounds to me that there's at least equal parts that the family loves stuff like this, and it'll be a curiosity in the store for people to watch. The things definitely are mesmerizing, I go down to check on a print and wind up just watching it for half an hour.

So I'm down to the printer I built from scratch. This was pretty much my plan all along - buy a kit, build it, become familiar with the whole thing, then build one from scratch, sell the original. I sold it at cost, mainly because by not making a profit I'm implying that I'm also not particularly interested in supporting it. I'll help and answer questions, but I'd do that for anyone who asked.

Yesterday I tore down the hotend on printer 2, gave it a good cleaning and put on a brand new nozzle. I think there was an obstruction because now my open-air extrusions are 0.48mm rather than 0.38mm, this matches the nozzle on the MG printer.

I also put a new motor on the extruder, so the printer now is completely converted to new motors. I also put on a straight, non-herringbone gearset and started to use it but then I realized that it had a different gear ratio than the herringbone set that I calibrated with, and I didn't really want to recompile the firmware with the new numbers so I just put the old gears back on. The herringbone gears are kind of cool but in a way I think I might prefer the straight gears. They print better and I think long term they will probably be be more durable. They also have an aesthetic similar to what you see with fixie bikes; bare bones no-nonsense functionality.

I printed two more Mars rover parts sets, one after the nozzle change and also dropping the temp 10* to 195*C, and another after installing the latest version of SFACT and switching to the OldDimension module rather than the experimental Dimension module. I also enabled cool. Neither did any good, the 3rd printed set was just as bad at stringing and cool introduced new problems. I need to use cool but I think I need to install a fan to do it right. I bought some fans for this but haven't set them up yet. I may also set up a light ring as long as I'll be running extra wires to the extruder.

Audiobook finished

Chanur's Venture by C. J. Cherryh

I actually finished this about a week or so ago, but it cut off in the middle. I assumed "crappy audiobook rip is screwed up" and loaded it onto the ereader and have been skimming forward a few minutes at a time, trying to figure out where I was at.

Today I got to the "end" and it turns out that the audio didn't cut out, the book did. This is the worst case of "take one story and chainsaw it in half" that I think I've ever seen. There's no wrapup of anything, there's no sub-story-arc that concludes. It shouldn't be a separate book, honestly.

The story itself is OK but is becoming less interesting to me really.

Promising new 3D printer software

I've attacked every other possible source of my problem, so today I decided to try a new piece of software to generate gcode from STL files. This software is called "slic3r" and replaces Skeinforge in the tool chain. It's written in PERL rather than Python, and claims to have a much cleaner, more maintainable code base.
( a somewhat long post, cut for your protection )