Finished the piece for my friends at Dark Mountain Printing ; I’m very satisfied with the results and hopefully they are as well. It’s got a nice “rustic” element to it I believe.  Granted, there is a big flaw that I only noticed afterwards it still does the job. It is displayed on the company logos page.

My 3-D printer from Printrbot is fully functioning for the most part; there are a few issues I have to troubleshoot from time to time.  The weight of the extruder motor tends to off-balance the weight of the y-axis movement causing the prints to not be level. The bed is even after using a level. The bearings holding the rods for the y-axis movement are are tight as can be but there is still a minutiae of the piece being “uneven.” As you might have guessed I had to purchase some extra parts from Printrbot’s web store from extra extruder tips and extra nuts and bolts. The upkeep is a lot of investment. Some of the pieces I don’t necessarily need but in the long run they’ll probably come in handy.

There’s not much help as far as referring to instructions. The company has a forum where you can find people with similar problems but you have to play around with it as you keep printing how hot you want the extruder temperature to be, how many mm of filament you want extruded per minute and the length of extrusion.  All of that has to be kept in mind while printing as to not melt more material than you can handle.  All in all it is a labour of love and hopefully down the line I can invest in an upgrade in this specific model or buy a better printer altogether.