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

PrusaBot

http://reprap.org/wiki/File:Assembled-prusa-mendel.jpg

o/



I am gearing up to take on one of the biggest projects I have tried yet. I am going to put together a Prusa Mendel 3D Printer!


This is going to be rather challenging for me, I will be learning as I go. Zoe seems a little bit curious for she seems to be getting more curious about robotics and engineering. I hope that once she sees this in action she'll be hooked. I am getting more and more excited about the possibilities, but it's going to take a lot of work...

So far I have the electronics ordered and received the stepper motors. I am still waiting on some of the control boards and the Arduino. I have the Glow-In-The-Dark ABS plastic filament with which I'm going to print my PrusaBot's components. Oh yeah, it's going to be awesome.


Hopefully we (midsouthmakers.org) will be able to borrow a members 3D printer so I can start getting comfortable with the machine and the software. I still need to decide if I'm going to take the lazy route and just order the hardware or locally source them out...