Okay.  Nobody has ever posted here, so I guess I'll give it a shot.

My fertile mind (fertile = full of...uh...fertilizer) has been envisioning a multi-(more than two)-headed extruder for 3D printing.

The bottom of the assembly is a Base Plate, where the heatbreaks come in from above, and protrude through to the heatblocks, which would be up against the Base Plate.  This plate would bolt to the rest of the extruder body, which would most likely be 3D-printed plastic.

   

Since this plate contacts the 3D-printed plastic body of the extruder, it must be made of a material that resists heat transfer.  It also must resist heat transfer, as it holds multiple heater blocks, and you don't want the hotter heater blocks influencing the cooler heater blocks around them.

The bolts (that hold the Base Plate on) also hold on the alignment plate.  This part is under the Base Plate with the heater blocks.  Besides keeping the heater blocks from twisting and touching one another, it must also act as a heat shield, to prevent hotter heat blocks/heads from influencing the temperatures of the cooler heat blocks/heads around them.

   

So, what do I make these parts from?  It has to be something easily drillable/cutable/machinable.  Or maybe printable?   Oh yeah, and don't forget cost-effective (i.e. CHEAP).

I saw something on Amazon called homasote, as I searched for "heat resistant board."  But, I dunno.  It may be good for soldering on, but can it handle multiple heater blocks up against it for long periods of time?

Any ideas?

I had made an "Aside" rhetorical question in my OneUp Build Log, last year, that since the q3dprinter.com website was about to go kerplooey, should we download everything (firmware, destructions, part files) from the site?

I also thought that I asked you (Administrator) a similar question, and was told that we had it under control.

However, I have seen requests for firmware and documentation, recently.

Maybe we should have all this "Q3D stuff" as attachments in one post?  Maybe we could have a OneUp post, a TwoUp post, and a ThreeUp post, if the files are different enough.

And what is with this five attachment limit per post?  Was that brought on by the host outages?

Enquiring minds want to know.  I want to know!

Hi All,

It looks like everything is back to normal with regard to the issues we were having with forum performance here.

Please post in the general discussion forum if you are still seeing problems.

Thanks!

Administrator

Hi All,

Since the major outage at our hosting provider, all has not been well with the forums.

Primarily, the responsiveness of the forum pages is absolutely AWFUL as compared to before the outage. I have a support ticket in on this issue, but I imagine they still have other things to worry about.

Secondly, this morning I discovered that the admin side of the forums was not working at all, so I could not immediately approve a new user registration (Sorry alins, and welcome ). This appears to be resolved for the moment.

If I don't see any performance improvement over the next couple of days, I will fast track the process of moving to Linux-based hosting (we are currently on Windows hosting, for reasons that are mostly no longer relevant).

Please bear with us while I (and A2Hosting) work through these issues. We apologize for the sub-par forum experience at the moment, and hope to have this resolved soon.

Administrator

After seeing MrAcoustic's cool post on the MakerX Fair in Columbus, I figured I would look up the next Maker Faire for Pittsburgh, and post the information.

What I found was that the Pittsburgh Maker Faire went on hiatus in 2018, and that the producer (Children's Museum of Pittsburgh) is re-evaluating their role as producer for future faires.  Reference: https://pittsburgh.makerfaire.com/2018/0...g-in-2018/

Now, Maker Faire 2017 was in October, so assuming that is the normal time of the year for the Faire, there is plenty of time to announce a 2019 Faire, but it is not looking good in the Steel City.

An alternative site (http: //pghmakerfaire.com/) popped up in 2018, but is very vague, and does not list any dates for faires.  You can send them an E-mail for ticket reservations.  The lack of dates/locations, combined with some poor English on the site, makes me think that this is a phishing site to harvest E-mail addresses to SPAM.

Hi All,

We're not dead!!!

On the morning of April 23, our hosting provider (A2Hosting) had a major issue with some of their windows-based web servers. (For reasons that are less and less relevant all the time, I chose a windows hosting plan. This will likely change.)

Once they discovered that they had a problem, they took all their windows hosting offline, which included fabric8r.com.

This morning, April 25th, they were finally able to restore service to our site. We suffered roughly 52 hours of downtime due to this issue.

I believe that they had to restore this site from a backup, which they say should have been within 24 hours of the outage. I haven't spotted any missing posts or users, but please confirm that everything is as it should be. If something is missing, please re-post, or if a user was dropped, please re-register. It's extremely unlikely that your user is not present on purpose.

In due time, we will take steps to ensure we don't suffer a total communication blackout again. Hopefully, in the unlikely event something like this happens again, we will at least be able to show you a page saying why we're down.

If you have any comments or suggestions on this situation, please post them in the General Discussion section.

Thanks!
Administrator

Hi All,

I wanted to let everyone know about a maker fair in Columbus, Ohio this weekend, Saturday, April 6th.

It seems like it's going to be fairly large - bigger than my local one in Cincinnati.

Find the details at makerx.org

I'll be there - it's only 10am to 5pm, so I think it might be a stretch to see everything.

If you go, post about it. If you happen to know me, say hi if you see me

Stan

I just became the proud owner of a oneup and i'm looking for the old community port of marlin so I can add an LCD to it and have some code to play with.  Anyone have this saved somewhere?

Hi All!

I just got an email where someone told me not to tell anyone about it until March 26th.

But I did find what they told me to be very interesting .

I guess I can't say anything more, other than perhaps to note that I'm already making plans for them to take my money .

I think quite a few people checking in here will be very interested as well. But... I guess you'll have to wait until the 26th!

Check back - I'll let the cat out of the bag absolutely as soon as possible.

You heard it here first!

Stan

Hi All,

Just saw this, and had to log in and post about it. I'm a subscriber to the Veritasium youtube channel, and he just posted a video that reminded me how cool 3D printing can be.

I consider this a must see. Go forth and watch, you won't regret it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97t7Xj_iBv0

Oh, and you will probably want this link when you're done with the video

https://www.compliantmechanisms.byu.edu

Enjoy All!

EDIT: Removed the annoying youtube redirect from the link.