It all paid off tonight. The build itself took me dozens of hours of time in the evenings after work, and along the way I learned to solder, needed a replacement cartridge header, mistakenly plugged the HBP temperature sensor into the quadrature port (hey, it fits!), had to remove and re-assemble the Z-stage to fix an embarrassing error, needed an electrical engineer friend to flash my extruder controller that came from MBI without a bootloader, fixed frustrating jams that I had to partially disassemble the extruder for, and encountered god knows how many other small issues that made me want to tear out my hair.
But it all came together. First, I printed the 0.5mm single wall calibration piece with a raft and it came out perfect. Then I printed it again without a raft. Perfect. Then I printed out a 20mm calibration cube. Perfect! (aside from me disrupting the print by moving aside some ooze boogers while the head was moving). The print quality is stunning. I was expecting so much less from this thing! Straight walls are straight and the layers are barely visible. It's been quite a haul to get here, but I'm completely elated. What a wonderful machine.
