Blob of Death, dead mini-Rambo board, additional potentially suspect components.... fix or scrap?
I had a large blob of death failure on my trusty MK2S. It was bigger than a golf ball / smaller than a baseball - enveloping the hot end, and began creeping up into the print fan area. Disheartening. When I encountered the blob, the extruder was pinned on the right side of the machine - with the Z-axis carriage being pushed up significantly higher on that side.
I used a heat-gun and slowly started pulling the blob away from the components. The thermistor and heater wires were in pretty rough shape. Most of the printed components were melted during the excision of the blob.
I looked at the mini-Rambo board and noticed that one of the SMC capacitors for the x-axis was damaged. I had an electrical engineer at my company replace that (30 second job).
Without anything plugged in - other than the display connectors, the board powers up and drives the display. It then goes into a MINTEMP error. I ordered another thermistor (not an exact match for the MK2S, but 100k) and plugged that in, along with the bed temp thermistor and tried again - still displaying the MINTEMP error. As a final step to determine whether or not the board is dead I tried multiple times, USB ports, and presence of connectors to flash the board. The board flashing fails every time - failing to make a connection. I'm pretty convinced the board is dead.
So,
-with a dead board costing $100,
-a new hotend assembly costing $80,
-suspect PINDA probe with deformed plastic end (?$),
-suspect x- and z - motors (?$)
I'm trying to decide whether throwing money at 7 year old Humpty Dumpty could bring it back to life as a spare? Is bringing it back even worth it? Or, should I take the loss and part it out on Ebay?
I have another printer. I just hate seeing useful hardware getting junked - happens too often.
Any insights would be appreciated.
... for the price of the spare parts you could pick up a decent second-hand Mk3.
I too hate junking working or fixable kit - if you're into robotics/electronic tinkering you might mine it for parts; or turn it into an alternate project - plotter for eg. Mk2(.n) are dropping off the support schedules so once you hit a major repair it's time to consider waving goodbye, accepting you've probably had your money's worth and perhaps leapfrogging a generation to the recent models.
Cheerio,