Quick Repair to the Ceramic Insulation

I'm a little bit surprised there's not more about doing this online. It seems to me that the way the insulation is wrapped around the hot end that a lot more people would be having trouble with this. But maybe it's just me.

The goal this time was getting it back to working with the minimum effort possible. So instead of removing the hot end and having to work with components while they're hot I'm just going to make a patch job.

For this I needed the kapton tape that came with my printer, scissors, blade, 5-in-1 painters tool, a pencil, and some ceramic insulation from Makerbot.

Removin' the print head... it's so easy to do! Or I've just done it a lot

Fortunately the ceramic tape takes pencil really well.

If you don't already have one of these 5-in-1 painter's tools you need to get one. 5-in-1? More like 500. This time I was using it as a cutting surface since my printer isn't back in the garage yet. Kinda brilliant if I do say so myself. In fact it gets better.

When I needed to cut the Kapton tape I just stuck it right to the tool and used the already cut ceramic insulation tape as a stencil. I wanted to have the insulation run under the existing insulation, but the new kapton tape run over the existing insulation, so I couldn't just stick them together at this point. But using my 5-in-1 as a cutting surface that was completely doable.

The 5-in-1 also helped laying down the kapton around the edge that sits between the two extruders.

This is clearly not a long term solution and so I'm going to keep the rest of the insulation around against the day that I have to take the whole thing apart and do it right next time. But for now I'm gonna call this good so I can get back to printing chess sets.