2015 Recommended Upgrades for the Printrbot Simple (Model 1403)

It's almost been 13 months since I first powered on my Printrbot Simple (Model 1403), and I figured I should share my little secrets on how I ran my 3d printer smoothly for more than a year.

Frankly, all I needed to do was to add some cheap stuff and printed parts to my Printrbot Simple.

Here's what I added to my Printrbot Simple, in order of importance.

I laid a rubber mat below my Printrbot. This stopped my 3d printer from sliding across the table and dampened much of the printer's vibration, preventing any damage to my table surface.

I added Printrbot's Alu Handle for Simple to my Printrbot Simple, which muffles noise during print jobs and holds my filament holder firmly in place.

I printed a filament spool holder for 1.25'' spool holes to mount on my Alu Handle for Simple. It fits Hatchbox filament spool (which have tiny spool holes), spaces the filament away from the printer's y-arm and has a filament guide. Pretty much the perfect filament spool holder.

I printed a cable holder to add to the body of my Printrbot Simple, so the cable connected to the extruder doesn't sag on the print bed (I can't find the design file anymore, but this should do the trick: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:910309)

I printed a slide-on extruder arm for my printer's extruder arm, so it's much easier (and less painful) to hold down the extruder arm.

I printed An Improved Fan Duct/Shroud to mount on my printer's fan for improved ventilation of the hot-end.

I printed feet for my Printrbot Simple to reduce noise/further dampen vibration from the printer.

Updates on Last Year's Endeavours

After reading through last year's blog post, a revelation struck me - a revelation that everything I mentioned in those blog post have evolved is truly enchanting. Here are all the crazy things that happened to the stuff I did last year.

1. My YouTube Channel

I've finally restored my YouTube channel to it's former glory, and to even greater heights. Although I've only uploaded 20 videos since August 2014, my videos are way more professionally made than before, thanks to both the resources available from my MCN partnership with Freedom!, and the experience I've gained from 4 years of YouTubing.




2. My Minecraft Endeavours

The Golden Age of Minecraft Makers has long passed

After Minecraft was sold to Microsoft, the 16-bit game inevitably turned to a more consumer-oriented direction, with many server-creators and game-modders leaving the scene, and many more (very) young children entering, creating the belief that Minecraft is a moderated little kid's game about building blocks that are not meant for teens and adults (which, unfortunately, is starting to become true).

I miss the times of building in my flat world, of countless hours spent messing with the .minecraft files, of learning about 3d animating my Minecraft world, of figuring out how to set up a CraftBukkit server, and I would love to go back to those blissful days of creation, but the environment for making and developing via Minecraft has changed for the worse, and so has people's mindset of Minecraft.

As for my Minecraft server, SpinTwerk, well I've got good and bad news.

The good news is, it's still living in my old computer's files, and throughout last year, my friends and I built over 42 majestic structures, rollercoasters, mini-maps, lobbies, carnivals and houses in a titanic area span. With the help of plug-ins, I managed to set-up 3 fully-automated hunger games maps, and a bunch of mob-arenas, together with over 20 mini-games.

The bad news is, ever since Wesley Wolfe filed a lawsuit against CraftBukkit, my Minecraft server has been stuck in version 1.7.9 of Minecraft, and almost no one has gone onto the server for over a year.

3. Mine-imator

David fulfilled his promise, and Mine-imator 1.0.0 has long been officially released, together with a smacksy new website (although the Disqus Mine-imator community is gone). New Mine-imator users wouldn't be able to see the old days of the application, where countless amounts of people would create collaborative projects on the Disqus community and made some really impressive stuff.