Monday 2 May 2016

Er, slight tweak to the previous... - 3D Printing Service

This has to be have been one of the weirdest decisions of my business career but here it goes: Blastersmiths UK cannot offer black 3D printed products until further notice. If you've paid for black parts and have them outstanding, you'll likely get an email shortly offering you a refund or choice of other colours.

Why is this cropping up now? Well, story time. The closure was triggered by contaminated black filament bricking our entire suite. We literally lost entire printers to a gunky mass of dust and otherwise contaminated PLA. It did all sorts of numbers on our hardware. We had to strip down, clear, rebuild and reconfigure large chunks of it to get ourselves operational again. Those printers would literally not print because of damaged parts caused by contaminated filament. We've done that over the last 2 or 3 weeks. The printers had been functioning solidly for 24 hours before we made yesterday's announcement across a range of colours. The premium black we were using was flowing fine and all was good. Then after a fixed number of printer hours, our hot ends started refusing to print black - of any brand or quality. We were able to reproduce the bug and we can confirm that our hot ends will not feed black filament past 2 hours of printer time, irrespective of contamination. They will clog, we clear them out and swap to another colour and everything prints fine. We can even switch back to black each time and get another 2 hours. The window between the start of printing in black and the first failure was ~24 hours but now we're down to a reproducible window of roughly 2 hours. Sadly rotating through colours is not sustainable as the failure often occurs mid print resulting in lots of wasted time and filament.

We have no idea why this bug has cropped up now when we've printed dozens of kilos of black filament in the past year. We are in touch with our hot end manufacturers and both filament suppliers to see what's what. The bug is sensitive to the quality of filament, too: the premium grade stuff we're using as a stop gap has a better half-life than the last of the known good bulk stuff but the bug is still there. The weirdest part is every other colour we can print does that - it prints! To that end, we can only offer non-black parts until we resolve this.

On the bright side, I've got some silver and brass filaments I'm going to be adding to the options to widen the array of colours available. I'll be looking to add more in the coming days.

As weird bugs go, this one takes the biscuit. We really are scratching our heads on this one. :D Black parts will be restored to the website as soon as we've fixed this bug...

-Mike Harratt
Blastersmiths UK

Sunday 1 May 2016

We're back in black! - 3D Printing Service Re-opens

We're back! After 2 and a half weeks of herculean effort from our team, we're back with our full range of products with the printers ready to work flat out to fill orders. We're still clearing a bit of a back log and we're still a couple of printers down but we've got things in hand. The frames that are offline are due to come on stream in the next week and the ones that are running have more capacity than when we closed.

We are currently using emergency stop gap filament to print black but it's literally the best stuff you can buy so there aren't any concerns there. It will print until judgement day and is just lovely. We'd use it normally were it not for the obscene cost. Orange and dark blue remain unchanged and we've been able to build up a bit of stock of products in those colours while the entire suite now begins to catch up with black parts orders.

What's next? Well, as I said, we've got a couple more printers to bring back on stream in the next week. The parts for those will be here Wednesday so I'm expecting full operational capability by next weekend. That'll give me 80% of the printers (and capacity) I need to cut the lead time from 4 weeks to 2 weeks. From there, we've just bought a new configuration of extruder drive that will allow us to print using direct drive rather than using our current Bowden tubes. That will let us print faster, with more precision and less post processing to remove over-extrusion dribbles and strings. Once installed on our current frames, it should provide us the last 20% of capacity that we can use to drop the lead time permanently to 2 weeks. The best part is that it's built for exciting new materials like NinjaFlex and other flexible 3D printing filaments so we can really start to expand our capabilities in the next year or so. From there, it'll be a case of simply adding more frames to add to our capacity. We're pretty happy with the home-brew system we use and it's built to scale up perfectly to as many printers as we need.

It's been a long few months and I'm reasonably confident our bulk supplier has changed things up their end sufficiently to prevent a repeat of this mess. The breathing space this closure has given us has allowed for some serious upgrade planning in the next few months. With the new drives and a few other bits and pieces that we're working to bring to the suite, we're coming out of this in better shape than we came in.

Thank you again to everyone for their support over the last few months, it's very much appreciated.

Mike Harratt
Managing Director
Blastersmiths UK