Even though the first printer delivers brilliant results so far, we are in a hurry a little at the moment to get the set of plastic parts finished for the second printer, RepStrap’s first child. It seems that printing speed and quality of this machine is limited to the point we stand now, while this is not yet the performance we homed on. A too heavy x carriage and a rather poorly adjustable an inaccurate linear bearing system at all are two sites to be immediately worked on after the Prusa set is finished.
I made a short video of the printer in action yesterday:
We got rid of the spaghetti issues later…
What I am really comfortable with is the overall compact hot end we purchased via reprap-fab.org. I think it might be one of the most staightforward hot ends available so far and it works like a charme. Nozzle diameter is 0.35mm, printing standard white PLA after first runs using “premium PLA-90″ from Orbi Tech – more on that later. All prints up to now were succesfully made on a painter tape covered, unheated print bed.
As already mentioned next door we finally got things wired up and successfully finished our first test prints resulting in even better quality than expected (for the fifth or sixth run at all..). Since our RepStrap was meant to initially start another Family tree of RepRaps – at least one original Mendel Prusa RepRap 3D printer as the nearest milestone – Simon yet got busy in printing a set of Prusa parts from the latest iteration 2 while he is still tweaking settings for enhanced build quality. No major modifications were necessary to the raw build at all, the whole assembly largely works as intended. It does print!
This is part 1 of our documentation and I will have a closer look on used materials, tools and the frame. We will have one post for each detail like the three axes, linear bearings etc. the following weeks while RepStrap’s first child is being completed gradually.
It’s been quite a while ago, when Simon began raving of 3D printing, but it took me several weeks to get into it. Finally – on the fourth of july – almost 4 months ago i put down this via twitter:
This should be one of my last tweets untill today (apart from a few running stats by runkeeper…). Seriously infected by the idea of 3D printing Simon and me started thinking of some kind of homebuilt CNC 3D printer and ended up designing a RepRapMendel inspired so called RapStrap, basically made of wood, threaded rods, aluminium profile, a bunch of standard 608 ball bearings as they usually can be found in skateboard-wheels etc., using a hand full of standard amateur tools. This was ment to be a set of entirely low cost, easy to optain parts aside from some purchased items from industrial suppliers, such as stepper motors and electronic circuit boards.
This is where we got so far:
We recently finished the main frame including all three axes, mounted stepper motors and toothed belts. Time for electronics! For reasons of time saving we decided to order a preassembled mainboard (RAMPS 1.4) via reprapworld.com last week which expectedly should arrive these days.
Oh, did I mention that this is all about open source and open hardware? Well, in case of doubt, now i did.
There will be more information on the construction details later in the build process.
