Problems with the Heat Source for the Heated Chamber

Printing with one halogen bulb had worked fairly well, so I advanced to the next stage - adding a second bulb for a total of 300 watts of heat. To do so, I redid the wiring - everything has a properly colored 14-gauge wire now (which is not to say that it's pretty yet).

Unfortunately, the extruder no longer worked properly inside the heated chamber with the extra heat. Interestingly, it didn't seem to be an electrical problem - the filament softened and jammed inside the cold end of the extruder:

You can see the jam on the right side of the filament in the above photo. Since the extruder couldn't push the filament through the bowden tube once the jam formed, it chewed through the filament and then spun freely until the end of the print file.

So, I proceeded to move the extruder to the outside of the heated chamber. I had previously printed two different options for the external extruder mount, and today I chose the one that was the easiest drop in replacement:

I also had to make a longer bowden tube to guide the filament between the cold end and the hot end. Generally, you want as short of a bowden tube as possible to minimize slop, so it's a bit of a bummer that I couldn't keep the cold end inside the chamber.

After I had that system running for a bit, I noticed that the aluminized styrofoam was not handling the increased heat well:

I made myself a quick metal shield from some scrap metal:

Unfortunately, once that was in place, the melamine (the wood) started to blister and smoke!

So at the end of the day, I'm back down to just one bulb. Later on I might put more bulbs in, as one bulb seems to max out at 50C for the chamber temperature. If I do, however, I'll space them out quite a bit more, or put some kind of stand-off between the wood and the bulbs.

One bulb can get the chamber up to 50C. I saw the melamine start to smoke before the chamber had gotten past 60C - not sure what the upper limit is there. Based on forum posts, it seems like the ideal chamber temp is around 70C.

Fans Installed, All Components Properly Installed

Kinda hard to tell, but the PEEK fan and the layer fan are installed and operational. I left the wire connections in "temporary" status because I'm planning to splice in at least one more fan and a couple LEDs.

This picture is taken facing downwards from just above the extruder hot end.

Here's the assembly with all errors-to-date corrected:

The spool and the extruder cold end are oriented correctly, the effector platform is flipped right-side-up and the hot end reinstalled correctly. The fans are installed for the first time.

Time to calibrate!

Extruder Cold End

Lots of errors here:

The extruder motor on the Rostock Max hangs below the top plate, in order to keep the distance between the "cold end" (the extruder motor) and the "hot end" (the heated nozzle) to a minimum.

The bracket is installed correctly, but I put the motor in backward. :-/

Here's what it's supposed to look like:

The white "gear" is a jog wheel so I can adjust the filament position manually. The red lever disengages the tension on the stepper motor so I can hang the filament out quickly if I want to.

After the extruder was in place (but not oriented correctly - that came later) I went on to install the spool holder and top plate - also at the wrong orientation:

The cold end and the spool holder are supposed to line up, like this:

But I didn't get it fixed until after my first couple prints were completed.

In my defense, the printer kit is set up so it's easy to set up a second extruder and spool (and at least one guy has gotten three extruders and spool operating at the same time).