After finishing the two cylindrical pieces, (the body tube and the nose cone) I then printed the bottom section of the TB3 rocket.

It printed well. Then, when the print job was finished, something bizarre happened.

Instead of dropping the bed it acted like it was still printing a previous job. The hot extruder head pushed itself into the plastic and the printer clicked a lot and before a couple of seconds had passed, I reached back and shut the thing off.

No major damage, but I was weirded out.

Skip to 8:30. (Sorry the video is so long. I no longer have any video editing software that works.)

I e-mailed Afinia and they replied very quickly, saying that it could be a corruption in the memory card, a fragmented file, or even a bad .STL file that I tried to print.

I printed a second test item the next day, hoping it was a one-off issue, but when this 1″ head model had printed, I got a similar result. It finished, but instead of lowering the bed, it kept printing. And from what it printed, I assume the job it’s stuck on is the job I printed a couple of days before – the two cylindrical rocket shapes.

Afinia says they have a new version of the printing software that supposedly fixes this particular bug, and in the mean time they informed me I could remove the Micro SD card and format it myself, and that may work.

So I unscrewed the base of the printer and removed the Micro SD and put it in the multi-memory-card reader in my computer and did a quick format and put it back.

Can’t do a test print at the moment, getting ready to go out to dinner. But I will try tonight and post.

Update: When I got back from dinner I printed a Lego piece. It ended successfully, with the head resetting normally. Looks like the format of the Micro SD card worked. Whew!