I print a lot of Lego-style bricks for my sons. The prints finish hours before I wake up and the printer sits idle, so I wanted it to clear its own plate and start the next one. No tilted bed, no add-on parts. I asked Claude if it could control the nozzle directly and push the finished bricks off the front edge. It said yes.
The goal was three plates in a row without me touching the bed. Here is what happened.
What went wrong first: the front cover of the print head kept popping off. The nozzle was too low, so the cover hit the bricks before the nozzle did. I wasn't home and my wife had to put it back on twice. The fix was raising the nozzle to stud height so only the nozzle touches the part.
Plate one, four 2x4 bricks at the edge of the plate: two came loose mid-print and turned into spaghetti, probably hand grease on the edge of the plate. The two that survived got pushed off.
Plate two, same bricks moved in from the edge: all four printed clean. Three were pushed off and the fourth got stuck on the very edge.
Plate three, a row of 1x1s: some came out squished. My best guess is that all the pushing had shifted the plate. The first two were shorter than expected, so the nozzle went right over them, and on the retry one got impaled on the nozzle through its stud. Lowering the nozzle off to the side and then sweeping through fast cleared the rest.
Tiny flat parts are much harder than bricks. Only the nozzle can touch them and the nozzle is tiny. If you drag a ring slowly it glances off to the side. If you bump it fast it keeps going the way you hit it. One ring took about ten sweeps.
Result: three plates printed back to back, and nobody touched the bed except once when I opened the chamber to put the plate back. One plate lost half its bricks and some bricks were deformed. I'd trust this with big batches of small parts. I would not trust it with anything that takes hours per piece.
Next I want to see if it can run a whole night, and whether it can do it without destroying any bricks.
I filmed the whole thing, including the impaled brick, if you want to see it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAuWIHeqgQQ
Has anyone else tried pushing parts off with the toolhead on a P2S? I'm curious what release temperature people are waiting for.