Good afternoon Fellow printers! Well, trials have got off to a good start on Monday, I have to admit it was one challenging day! The phrase “If it can go wrong, it will” was true of Monday. From overflowing water baths to dosing a full production run of colouring in less than 5 mins! Starting something new is always stressful and Monday was no exception.
Thankfully the one thing that performed well was the new line, most of the hurdles were due to our own mistakes as we learn how to manage our workflow with the new production line. It will continue like this as you try new settings to either improve the tolerance or increase the line speed or even leaning the start-up procedures. I always find this stage very interesting, you find ways to run the line and techniques that you believe are the best solution to the problem. These aren’t vastly complex issues, it can be as simple as which hand do you hold the snips in as you pluck the filament from the die-face. But it all forms a method and teaching guide. The interesting thing is how stepping back and studying something very simple can improve the experience by reducing the amount of interaction. It’s a super rewarding experience to streamline the task, needless to say, this process continues but the major gains are found in the next few months.
So the main aim of the next couple of weeks is to get familiar with the new line, continuing with our normal colours and normal material, nothing major should change just yet. We need to understand the line, throwing variables like different materials and colourings at this stage would not be wise. We are looking for mid-October for a production run of some posh PLA which I will hope you will all like 😊. One thing we did have to do straight off was to sort out the winding system, this needs to be set up and working within 90% of optimum for it to even function. So as we progress through the colours you should start to find that your spools start to look much neater. Each day we tweak the settings to improve the winding so hopefully the more familiar we get with the system the better this should become, having said that it's already a million times better than what we currently have. Okay, so that plenty of chat let me share the spooling video I promised on Monday 😊