Alright, for the first section of our printer maintenance chapter, we're going to take a look at printer bed cleaning. So we're going to clean our print bed, we're going to take a look at how we can clean and maintain our extruder. And then, in the next section, we'll jump into some of the mechanical things we can do around the printer to keep it as good as possible. So the first thing I want to talk about is the PDI bed. Now, after printing on this bed for hours and hours and hours, you'll find that it can get a little bit of plastic left over on it, it can get a bit dirty, you might be touching it constantly, the oils of your finger will be getting onto the print bed and just, you know, leaving a bit of residue there. That might cause some issues later on down the track. So every couple of prints, preferably every print, but every couple of prints, you might need to just grab some isopropyl alcohol out, grab some paper towel out, some paper towel out, doesn't matter what brand or anything like that, and just give it a nice thorough wiping down with some paper towel.

So it's as simple as just putting a little bit of isopropyl on there and just giving it a good wipe down, just to strip any of those oils that have built up over time or any bits of plastic. Alternatively, you might find yourself putting some PVA glue down if you're printing with, say, nylons or some specialty filaments. If you've got that PVA down on the bed, you might notice that the bed gets a bit, you know, looks a bit worse away. So you can grab some water out and some paper towel and do the exact same thing just with water. And as PVA is soluble with water, it'll just wipe right off your bed. And once you're finished wiping down your bed, if you've got any issues with prints sticking to the bed, you can grab some 2000 to 2500 grit sandpaper and just give it a light sand and that'll just roughen up that surface and allow your plastics to adhere really well to it. So that's pretty much all I'd say about the print bed. The next thing I would take a look at though, is just the nozzle wiper pads.

So lucky for us, the LulzBot Mini comes with this pad here. Now this is essentially just a wiper pad for the nozzle and at the start of every print, your printer will actually wipe down the nozzle and make sure it's clean. But you can see that this is getting a bit grubby here. So all we need to do is grab out our hex key set that comes with our printer. Now, bear in mind that most of these things are done on a LulzBot machine, but it's not important. I'm sure that if you've got a 3D printer, you've got some documentation that'll teach you how to do all of this stuff. I just want to show you guys that these are the things that you should be looking for when you are maintaining your 3D printer. We'll just get that right, the right key out for this one. And it's as simple as just undoing these bolts and replacing the wiper pad. Pull this out. You might also notice that this thing, after a bit of time in the printer, the piece of plastic that this goes into starts warping around.

These are printed in ABS and while they're still, they're quite solid, they're not perfect and they will warp over time and you might lose some of that integrity. So you can see that there, there's a bit of plastic gunking that up. This isn't too bad at all. I just wanted to show you guys how simple it was to replace it. You can even just turn it upside down if you like. But we've got plenty of these things lying around now. So you just grab that out. It's just like a scotch pad. Just feed it straight back in there. Press it into place. Just like that. And we've got a brand new pad for our nozzle. But you can see it's not as perfect as it should have been or it would have been back in the past. It's warped out of place a bit, sitting next to that hot plate. It's probably doing that. It's not super important. As long as the nozzle is getting onto that pad, it's fine. So that's another thing that you can just keep an eye on with your printer bed. We'll just do those ones up once more.

We'll actually take a look at printing the replacement parts for the printer. And I'll show you where you can find parts like this part here. Parts that are actually printed by LulzBot machines at the LulzBot headquarters. And you can actually print them at home as replacement parts for your own printer. So if I got sick of this thing being out of shape, I'd go ahead and print myself a brand new one. Now the hobbed bolt is the next part of the printer that we're going to take a look at maintaining. What can happen over time is you get a little bit of filament being ground out from the filament, the main filament stream. And it will grind out into the hobbed bolt, which we took a look at, which is this part of the extruder. So what we're going to do is show you guys how you can just clean out your hobbed bolt and make sure that you don't get any grinding problems because it can't get traction on that filament stream.

So what we'll do is we'll just pull this out and take a look in here. And we can see that down in this hobbed bolt, there's just a little bit of filament gumming that up. So again, we can go into our LulzBot toolkit and we can get our small steel brush out. All we have to do is pull that to the side and just give it a quick brush out. And you'll notice that a ton of filament streams just start falling out of there. Little bits that are caught in the teeth of that hobbed bolt. Alternatively, you can use maybe just like a steel pick or something, like a little dental pick thing, one of these things. And they work just the same. So once you've got all that cleaned up, just make sure you get in there and get it really clean. And now you know for a fact that your hobbed bolt is clean. So that's something that you should do fairly regularly, especially if you've been printing with PLA because it's particularly likely to grind out there.

Another thing we can do while we're checking this hot end is just have a look at these gears on the extruder, the stepper motor here. Now this little gear is well known to wear out. So just check it out and see if it's, you know, worn out. It would take a year or two for it to get to that point. Now it's fine at the moment. But these are the two gears that you'd be looking for because of how quickly they're turning sometimes and how often they're on when they are on. You can just notice that they wear down and you don't want your gears here to start skipping steps. So that's another thing that we can do. And finally, we can take a look at the hot end itself. So we'll just have a quick look in here. As we're heating up our printer, we'll notice that the printer goes through its sequence, it cleans off that nozzle. But then at the front of the printer, it sits there and waits for it to get up to temperature.

And while that's happening, sometimes you'll notice a little bit of filament coming out. It'll only be like maybe an inch, a little bit less than an inch of filament will just sort of stream out of that hot end. And what you can do is just grab out your tweezers and just grab that little wisp of filament away before the print starts. Otherwise, you might see a little tag on the skirt in the first line of your print, which isn't terrible, but you don't want anything in that part of your print. So just go ahead and remove it if you can. So that's pretty much all we do for our extruder and our print bed to keep them as good as possible. Making sure that nozzle pad is replaced, you know, wiping down your PEI pretty frequently. I'd say you do this once every couple of weeks and just make sure that everything's in order. Make sure that hob bolt is nice and clean. That's a really important one. And again, check those gears which will be important in a couple of sections time when we look at printing replacement parts. So let's move into mechanical maintenance for our 3D printer.