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Commissions Closed Indefinitely
a year ago
General
Hey all,
While I'm reasonably sure there's few if any that still read my posts, I do feel I need to give you an update. As of today (05-31-2024) all commissions will officially be closed indefinitely until such a time as I can get my equipment restored to working order. Allow me to explain.
Around September of last year my snapmaker—which is a 3-in-1 cnc milling/carving, laser etching/cutting, and FDM 3d printing machine—developed a crippling fault in the form of a warped bed. Now this doesn't effect the quality of any laser etchings that I might do, but it rendered the machine useless for 3d printing and likely cnc milling and carving, So I bought an Ender 5 Plus from Creality, which turned out to be a God send in terms of printing ability.
Never before had I been able to print such intricate structures, and until the start of this month, I believed I would finally be able to get a handle on a few projects I've been working on to showcase my abilities. That's when the control board, and the UI tablet I bought with the machine melted.
The control board failed in a way that I'm unable to ascertain the nature of, however replacing it solved the machine side issue—we'll get back to this in a moment. I found that the tablet, when it over heated, had cracked the screen and rendered the entire right edge unresponsive. It was replaced, and everything worked fine until the control board (which I had yet to replace at this point) failed.
Now, on replacing the tablet I updated the firmware, believing that would solve the issue with the control board as well, it did not. 180$ and a week of waiting later, new board. Everything worked! Plugged the tablet in, flashed over the firmware, everything still worked, discovered that one of the issues I was having with the machine was a lockout loaded into it by the tablet (no big deal, machine still works) but... I also discovered that my tablet will not load programs from a usb drive. Fan-fucking-tastic! Turns out, this is a known issue by creality that has yet to be remedied with another firmware update, and given that they only seen to update their software about every 4 to 6 months, it will likely be next year before I can update it and see if the issue is solved.
Because of this I've decided to temporarily—albeit indefinitely—close all commissions for laser etchings and 3d prints until such a time as I can get both machines back up and running again, and all chainmail commissions will be on a FCFS basis with very limited availability.
I had planned to open two more product commission slots—paintings and drawings—within the next few months to a year, however two things are preventing me from doing so. The first is largely my fault as I am being paid to help my family take care of our properties and simply lack a significant amount of time to devote to learning. The second is that a tablet that I bought quite literally 11 days ago so that I could get back into drawing after 15-ish years turned out to have a faulty component and I'm currently waiting on replacement parts to arrive so that I may complete the troubleshooting process.
At this point, I literally only have 1 thing left in my arsenal of products that I can offer, and that's the chainmail. My writing isn't ready to be released, and likely won't be within the year, so there's a better than good chance that SFS will go dormant, and—like me in real life—simply vanish into obscurity... at least for a while.
I'm not going down without a fight, but right now, I'm the only one fighting, so don't be too surprised if this is the last update for a very long while.
While I'm reasonably sure there's few if any that still read my posts, I do feel I need to give you an update. As of today (05-31-2024) all commissions will officially be closed indefinitely until such a time as I can get my equipment restored to working order. Allow me to explain.
Around September of last year my snapmaker—which is a 3-in-1 cnc milling/carving, laser etching/cutting, and FDM 3d printing machine—developed a crippling fault in the form of a warped bed. Now this doesn't effect the quality of any laser etchings that I might do, but it rendered the machine useless for 3d printing and likely cnc milling and carving, So I bought an Ender 5 Plus from Creality, which turned out to be a God send in terms of printing ability.
Never before had I been able to print such intricate structures, and until the start of this month, I believed I would finally be able to get a handle on a few projects I've been working on to showcase my abilities. That's when the control board, and the UI tablet I bought with the machine melted.
The control board failed in a way that I'm unable to ascertain the nature of, however replacing it solved the machine side issue—we'll get back to this in a moment. I found that the tablet, when it over heated, had cracked the screen and rendered the entire right edge unresponsive. It was replaced, and everything worked fine until the control board (which I had yet to replace at this point) failed.
Now, on replacing the tablet I updated the firmware, believing that would solve the issue with the control board as well, it did not. 180$ and a week of waiting later, new board. Everything worked! Plugged the tablet in, flashed over the firmware, everything still worked, discovered that one of the issues I was having with the machine was a lockout loaded into it by the tablet (no big deal, machine still works) but... I also discovered that my tablet will not load programs from a usb drive. Fan-fucking-tastic! Turns out, this is a known issue by creality that has yet to be remedied with another firmware update, and given that they only seen to update their software about every 4 to 6 months, it will likely be next year before I can update it and see if the issue is solved.
Because of this I've decided to temporarily—albeit indefinitely—close all commissions for laser etchings and 3d prints until such a time as I can get both machines back up and running again, and all chainmail commissions will be on a FCFS basis with very limited availability.
I had planned to open two more product commission slots—paintings and drawings—within the next few months to a year, however two things are preventing me from doing so. The first is largely my fault as I am being paid to help my family take care of our properties and simply lack a significant amount of time to devote to learning. The second is that a tablet that I bought quite literally 11 days ago so that I could get back into drawing after 15-ish years turned out to have a faulty component and I'm currently waiting on replacement parts to arrive so that I may complete the troubleshooting process.
At this point, I literally only have 1 thing left in my arsenal of products that I can offer, and that's the chainmail. My writing isn't ready to be released, and likely won't be within the year, so there's a better than good chance that SFS will go dormant, and—like me in real life—simply vanish into obscurity... at least for a while.
I'm not going down without a fight, but right now, I'm the only one fighting, so don't be too surprised if this is the last update for a very long while.
I'm not the kind of person to go down without a fight, so come hell or high water, I will be back this year, even if it kills me.
At this point the only thing I can reliably offer is the chainmail and laser etchings as the other machine I have just needs to be set up again. But otherwise, I'm really at a loss with the 3d printer, and since comparable machines start at 500 dollars, I'm not really able to replace it while my credit card is so loaded up. (3.5k is a real bitch when one only makes 750$ a month)
It's still not operating correctly.
Yep. So a suggestion by someone who didn't have any idea what to look for turned out to be the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. As it turns out the extruder did not "fail" as I thought it had; the hot end cut out and got... very clogged (i.e. I had to take a blow torch to it to unclog it) once that was fixed, I attempted a print, only for it to happen again (hence how I know the hot end cut out) so I'm back to square one on that front. That said I am gaining ground! Despite the fact that I ended up losing the feeder tube to the second hot end failure, and now have to order a repair kit for it, I now have at least some semblance of a direction to go with repairing the damn thing.
So, there are a number of potentiometers on the control board which control the power output of the board to the individual axis and components. With the fact that everything seems to be working correctly until I go to run a print I'm under the impression that there's not enough power going to the hot end/extruder, so I need to adjust it until it does work, and hopefully I don't burn up the board doing so...
Anyway, with that in mind it'll be a while longer before I get things back up and running, but at least now I have some hope that SFS won't go belly up.