The further adventures...

Thought you'd all get a good laugh. I've gotten to the point where I laugh.
Took mine in to get the bed connector fix. Very handy to live in the same town. Jerry replaced the bed then sat with me and went over the auto bed leveling in Mattercontrol. We did a print, and all though we didn't do a full-on level, we did enough and to my excitement, the print came out beautiful. I saw that my printer was capable of producing the kind of prints I've been jealous of on these forums.
The only issue seemed to be with my 10 yr old laptop. We ended up using his computer to get the results and I decided that maybe it's been my laptop that has had USB issues. I got home, fired it up and still had the connection issues, so, I went out and bought a new laptop. After loading drivers and software, fired up that bad boy and...
Now the Extruder won't heat up. Not in Mattercontrol or Repetier. Haven't heard from Jerry in a couple days. He's probably as tired of dealing with me as I am tired of dealing with the printer.

 

The commands waiting problem I had earlier fixed itself when I wiped my old PC clean and reloaded everything. Everything works fine now except for the Extruder. Since I don't see any obvious loose connections, I'm guessing based on other posts, it's the hot end that has failed. Jerry offered to either send one to me or I can take it down and have them do it, which, I prefer to do in case there us something else, they'll be able to hunt it down. Stay tuned!

 

Since I've found that sometimes staying away from the printer for a day or two miraculously fixes things, I'd gone out every evening when I got home and start it up just for kicks. Everyday this week, the extruder continued to refuse to heat up. Tonight, I tried it once more and would you believe it? The SOB heated up. I calibrated it and started printing a bracket for a fan for the ramps board. The first layer was just a bit too high, but I let it go until a chunk of gray goop plopped down on the part that clips to the board, effectively ruining it. There was a lot of this gray goop coming out while I was calibrating. I ended up pulling out the blue filament until i finished calibrating. I imagine it must be a mixture of old white and black filament that got stuck in or on the hot end and came off while printing. Since the layer was a little high, I assumed this is where I would enter an offset in the code. I tried -.2 and got a really nice print, not perfect mind you, but pretty darn good. Bottom line is, even with a new computer, it still seems like it's up to the printer whether it feels like working properly or being stubborn. All things seem to point to a bad connection somewhere, but at least it doesn't appear to be a failed hot end. The auto-level really rocks! As long as the printer cooperates, I think I may just become a printing fool!

 

That grey goop I had on my stock hotend the first day I got it... I replaced the hotend withan E3d v6 and there is no more grey goop... just upgrade that hotend!