MONDAY

All I did was basically do my powerpoint because I wanted to speak to my mentor face-to-face, and tell her what I needed to do compared to texting it via slack. I much rather do that one-on-one interaction than anything else. And she was helpful all throughout. So basically, that’s all I did on that day, just doing the powerpoint, and getting the final approval of it by my mentor.

 

TUESDAY

I went to the career/research workshop in the morning, and it was nice to know what to do in the academia side of things. The first assignment that I did was print some lines given its extrusion rate, or E, and then measure the lines that I printed with a measuring device. And the other assignment that I also did was create a shopping list to get the materials for both extruders, plus show the links so my mentor can buy them. That was most exhausting thing I had to do so far because it was so tedious to begin with. Other than that, I just focused on my prints, and that was all.

 

WEDNESDAY

All I did throughout most of the day was watch some tutorials about the settings in the Cura slicer, in particular about how to cater the settings for the PETG filament. That’s what I did while I was at the library because I wanted to be in a peaceful, and silent environment. And I felt productive during that time too. Then right after that in the afternoon, I had lunch with some REU friends, and headed off to my lab where all I did was put the filament to dry it overnight. And that was it.

 

THURSDAY

I printed with the PETG filament. The first thing that I wanted to print was the benchy model. Which is just the tugboat print. Once I printed it, there were some “blotches” if you will that were on the model, and I just thought that it’s just the remnants of the old PLA filament just stuck there, so I did another print, and the same thing happened. I asked a lab mate of mine who knows his way around 3D printers, and asked him what went wrong, and he told that there might some clogging issues going on with the extruder. And he was right all along, it was so bad that I couldn’t open up the noddle with my wrench. And I did once I got back home, and all I did was thinking how can I fix it.

 

FRIDAY

So when I arrived to my lab, the first thing I obviously did was fix the issue of the clog. I tried my best disassemble it. However, all the screws were too tight, and it took some time and a heat gun to resolve that issue. And then another problem happened and it was that my mentor instead told me to use the PLA filament rather than the PETG due to time’s sake. And to be honest, I’m glad that she said that. Anyways, this week has been by far the most busiest week in my opinion, and I know that it will probably get more hectic as the weeks go by. But I knew what I signed up for. So here’s a picture of the skyline while I am typing this in the O’Connor building just to get away from it all for a while and focus on this blog.

 

Thanks for reading,
Brandon Espinoza.