Published: Feb 1, 2021 by

A few weeks ago the Z Upper Right Assembly broke on my Mini 2. At first, I wasn’t quite sure what was wrong I only knew that the tool head couldn’t raise on the right-hand side. In an email to Adrian (at Lulzbot) we figured out the part had a hairline crack. In a year without covid I could have gone down to LVL1 to make a replacement part, but not this year. Luckily Lulzbot was easy to get a print from, and really fast too (kudos to them, and that’s nice to know for the future).

With this being my first repair I was a bit nervous. I had never taken my mini apart or tinkered too much instead opting for that with my prints. The good news is Lulzbot has amazing documentation for each printer that make repairs relatively straight forward. Beginning to end taking things apart and getting them back together per the doc took me an hour, and then it was go time. My first print was rocktopus which came out great. Seeing the right-hand axis work as expected was a huge relief, and gives me some confidence that I could do more for in the realm of mods and repairs in the future.

Why does this matter? Because if you can’t fix it, you don’t own it, and I was blown away how easy it was to fix my Lulzbot. On top of that it was fun. Outside of gardening I don’t have the opportunity to just fix stuff with my hands that much, and I miss that. Something to look into this year maybe?