About a month after seeing smoke pouring from the hot-end of my Reprap Prusa, we’re printing again.
The crazy part is that the repair was little more than two hours of work (1 hour of diagnostics + 1 hour of actual fixing). What took a month was recovering the gumption lost watching the machine fail.
Building and operating a RepRap has taught me so many things. Most of them I had already known to some extent (electrical, mechanical and software engineering, etc.) but also many other more abstract things that I had less deliberate knowledge of.
The value of community support, of collaborating without overhead and how determination doesn’t mean crashing into the same wall relentlessly. That somehow stopping to stare at the wall for a month gives you a chance to see a crack, a cleavage point where you can strike with 1/1000th of the force and the wall just falls away. These are the ideas I want to encapsulate and communicate in my RepRap book.