We're in business ;)

PrusaBot progress

I've decided to take some time off printing the parts and work on any fine tuning I can. I'm going to reprint some of the parts that suffered warping before I found the oven trick. I'm currently happy with 2 of the vertex with feet, I'll see about reprinting some of the other ones tonight. My goal is to print tonight and tomorrow and have at least one set of parts for the Prusa...

Vertex#2

This is the second attempt at printing a vertex for the Prussia Mendel. I heated the build platform for about 5 minutes in the oven on a low temp. This seems to prevent bowing a bit. The piece is slightly lifted off the platform, but jot as much as the first.

Glow in the dark penny bottle opener

First finished vertex

Wow. I need some cleaning, but it almost looks like it's supposed to!

5th print

First attempt at a pulley. The base looks pretty good to my untrained eye, but the upper business end needs a lot of work. Still pretty cool!

Invader #2

I think the areas that are supposed to be clear will be better after the 5d firmware upgrade... This is still pretty cool!

Space invaders :p

Print 5

Print number 2, 3

Wow. This is awesome. I hope the misses doesn't mind the sound of the printer after this month :p

Print 1

She's alive!

MakerBot

Zoe and I hung out at the maker-space today. We watched Sonny print out a motor mount for his Prusa- it was pretty cool to watch. We figured out today that the extruder assembly has some issues. It looks like the NiChrome wire is starting to burn through the insulation and the kapton tape. It also seems that when this hot-end was assembled it was not tested out to have the right resistance. This appears to be causing a temperature variance of anywhere between 10C to 30C. Towards the later part of the day we decided to make some test extrusions. We found that the filament driver is failing to drive the plastic filament into the heating chamber. The owner of the bot tried to adjust the tension, unfortunately damaging the idler pulley. With all of these issues now presenting themselves at the beginning of our build process, we are going to use an extra extruder assembly and hopefully tomorrow night start the test prints.
I hope to get the MakerBot printing this week, accurately, so I can start printing the parts for my PrusaBot this weekend.

Getting to know Nick's MakerBot... this is awesome!

Zoe watched me move the printing bed, as soon as it started to move her jaw dropped :p