An eventful few days, largely dealing with wear and tear maintenance issues.

X End Idler Split

It seems that whilst using lubricant on the Z axis rods was a reasonable idea it soaked into the X End Idler and caused weakness between layers (I believe). This in turn resulted in a slight split and the head of the hot end ploughing through the last few layers of a print.

Attempting to realign the print (of a gear) seemed to work fine, but closer inspection shows it was pretty skewed and is not usable as it stands.

Luckily the split didn't grow, or affect subsequent prints, so I could print out it's replacement.

Perfecting the Pulley

So my circles were coming out oval and I still hadn't printed the perfect pulley.  Suspecting that a replacement pulley with a dent in the teeth was the cause of the oval problem I brought the original out of retirement with a quick hack.  This allowed me to print a few pulleys, and this time I achieved pulley nirvana.  The secret? Cool in Skeinforge.  It seems obvious now, but my previous attempts to utilise the cool module didn't work because I was using "orbit". Changing this to "slow down" meant that the spurs and teeth were laid down much slower, and hence with much less deformities!

Loose X Belt

Having more faith in the X pulley I was expecting perfect(ish) circles, but no joy.  A bit more observation made me realise that the X belt was wobbling quite a bit at the apex of each turn. I had thought the belt was tight enough, but it seems it was not - and tightening it so it "twangs" when tapped results in much better circles.