Lore

Once upon a time, seven students  from D&I had been excited to start on course 41041, slide rules in hand, dxf and gcode on their trusty USB’s. Everyone excited and ready for the Lab of the Sky.

Alas, when the time finally came to laser cut and 3D print, the crowned plague struck, forcing our unlikely heroes into lockdown. Virtual lectures, virtual meetings, virtual prototyping and everything changed. Our heroes almost lost their pluck. They had hoped in vain, that Skylab would be open for this final battle of the three weeks. Very sad. 

The course many of us had been excited for since the beginning of our first semester has been foiled by the invisible enemy. Damn and blast.

The Hero We Need But Don't Deserve

When the three week period started we had been locked down for months with no hope of accessing Skylab and getting any physical things done. Things looked bad. Morale was low.

But from these ashes, a hero arose. A hero that could not take the virtual prototyping anymore. A hero with a bank account.

Eternally grateful for his great sacrifice and selflessness, we awaited our salvation for three working days and as many nights. Tuesday june ninth it was here. The Ender-3 had arrived!

And to make our day even better the company had even provided us with sustenance for our quest in the form of Haribo. VERY cool!

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The Assembly

When the printer arrived the first step was to assembly it from scratch. As we all know whenever you open a manual that’s isn’t from IKEA, one is destined to be disappointed. Sure enough, the manual had many flaws, leaving our heroes unsure how to assemble the beast.

To save us all and this three week period we called upon our Lord, Savior and Youtuber Thomas Sanladerer

With his tutorial video on how to assemble an Ender-3 and our blood, sweat and toil the quest assembly ended as success after two long hours.

First component

After the assembly we started to make our first component which was an assembly mechanism to the stepper motor. We could quickly see the PLA wasn't attached to the left side of the plate and as the PLA cooled, the material retracted and made an uneven surface. Our instinct was to try to leave it and maybe it would recover and sure enough it did.

And with this print our three week period started in earnest. Skrrrrrt!