A Prusa Mini 3D printer was in a house fire and somehow survived.
An interesting post by Reddit contributor OkRelationship1842 describes what happened:
”Had a house fire and the printer got sprayed directly by a fire hose. Thought it was trash but with the little work and thanks to all their open source parts, I was able to print out all of the damaged parts and get it working again!”
I would have thought the machine would be trash as well. Smoke, heat, and even water damage would certainly render the machine inoperative and possibly unrepairable. Water on electronics is never a good thing, but in this case, there was likely no power traveling through the circuits.
Here we can see the parts from the fire after disassembly:
Amazingly, the stepper motors and the mainboard were “fine”, although intermittent issues in the future might appear.
What was replaced? According to OkRelationship1842, the belts were replaced due to heat damage, along with some wiring. The print plate was permanently warped, but that is easily replaced. In all, only US$50 was spent on replacement parts.
At least some of the polymer parts were damaged, likely by heat that distorted their shape. These were easily re-printed on another machine and used in the reassembly.
Josef Prusa himself responded to the thread, saying:
“I hope there was minimal damage on the property and no harm to you and your family. Good job on the fix! Happy printing!”
This is certainly not a situation anyone should have to go through, but house fires do happen. In most cases, the printer would not be repaired in this way because the operator might not have the ability to rebuild the device, and insurance would (hopefully) pay for a brand-new replacement machine. OKRelationship1842 is hoping to upgrade to a CORE One 3D printer.
The final word on this scenario comes from FileDozr, who suggests the repaired machine be renamed as the “Prusa Mini Phoenix Edition™️”.
Via Reddit
