I was having problems with my (newly arrived) mini after around 8 hours of use, particularly around the edges. It was initially making unpleasant noises near the edges, it got stuck spiralling around the edge once, and multiple times I’ve had patterns go wrong near the edge, after which all patterns seemed to stop around 3cm away from the edge.
I thought I might have bubbles somewhere near the edge, so I wanted to check before they possibly got worse. So I opened it up and mine seems to have possibly been screwed too tightly, as the holder for the magnet seems to have been scraping away at the film at the edges. Presumably this caused too much friction and it got stuck on the rough patched, and then consequently made the ‘canvas’ smaller because it thought it hit the side, or something. This makes sense when you consider the worst issues were happening near the screw points, and they were very tight.
I’m attaching photos of the smaller spiral I was getting after a pattern went wrong and it started drawing them smaller (I had to unplug to ‘reset’ this each time it happened), as well as the inside where you can see the film has been scraped at by the plastic, and the filings of film around the magnet.
I’ve given the film, plastic around the magnet, and gears all a good coating of superlube, and screwed it back together firmly but not quite so tight, and it is currently running spirals and sounding much better so far. I’ll run it a few hours this evening and then during the day tomorrow and see if that has done the trick, and update back here.
