It’s been a long road, but my Reprap Mendel Prusa 3D printer is finished and I’m printing stuff. There have been so many problems and fuckups along the way, that when I finally started printing stuff a week ago I didn’t think much of it, but with hindsight it was a Grand Moment™. I’ve joined the ranks of 3D printers. You may now commence the “oohing” and “aahing” I understand are my dues.
So far, with the exception of a frog and a replacement LM8UU Y axis holder, I’ve mostly been printing calibration cubes. These are shapes intended to troubleshoot your printer and give you an opportunity to get your Skeinforge/Sfact setting correct. As you can hear in the video there’s some rattling going on on the Z-axis, and I have some trouble with Y-alignment on some prints, but with lowered acceleration on Z and Y, and perhaps tightening of the belt on the latter, I think I’ll be able to print halfway decent parts.
Sara came over for a few days, and as any good boyfriend I set about making her feel comfortable helping out with the build. It was much appreciated as it often seems I have three hands too few to get something assembled. Making the print bed was slow going, and as I’m using plexiglass for print surface we broke off a couple of pieces before getting a more-or-less square one. The plexi is actually good for printing on cold, at least once the PLA starts sticking to it, but if your hotend gets too close the PLA fuses with the surface, and you’ll inadvertently run the head through the board which will create pockmarks in the surface, and possibly plug your nozzle with plexi — which is the reason I’m printing with the 0.5mm nozzle instead of the 0.35 I started with.
[x_video_embed no_container=”true”][/x_video_embed]
We were leveling the print table for a good two hours, and found that the design with springs between the lower and print bed wasn’t optimal, since the springs were unevenly springy. I had bought a whole kit with the suckers but none seem to fit well enough and give enough force to work. It’s a good design on paper, but we found that it was just easier to use two sets of nuts per fastener bolt. Protip: Get spanners which fit instead of fiddling with adjustable ones or pliers; it’ll save you so much time and temperament it’s worth the expense.
At this moment thanks might be in order. A great amount of those go out to Traumflug for design and massive help with the electronics, and Kliment, Triffid_Hunter, Action68 and everybody else who’s been quick to lend support in #RepRap on IRC or on the reprap.org forums. When you’re as ignorant of a subject as I was about the RepRap, you rely on the help and input of friends and strangers, and without the support of everyone from awesome girlfriend Sara to KKV electro to that guy who barely spoke English but cut me some metal rods, this project might have fallen over and not gotten up after any of innumerable stumbles.
Of course, thanks to the people here in Turku for providing an incentive to start this, as well as the means and time to finish it. Ultimately, bigup to Adrian Bowyer for getting the RepRap project started, as well as all those who keep improving upon it. I have a public presentation of the project on Thursday 6th October at 1800 in Gallery Titanik in Turku, and if you’re nearby I’d love to see you there.
Congratulations on getting it done!
Do you have any sense of where the smart money should go in terms of *purchasing* a 3d printer (kit or not)?
The way I see it, and I could be wrong, is there are relatively cheap options like makerbots and repraps (under 2K usd) and then there are the big boys like Objet which are 20K usd and up. There seems to be a gap in the middle of the market. I would love to have a proposal for the fine arts dept here to purchase one, but I feel like that middle market price point (5-10K?)is exactly what they would go for!
There isn’t much of a middle market yet. A RepRap you can assemble for USD500, and the next step are the Objets and Zcorps, as you note.
I can’t find it now, but Prusa (the guy who designed the Medel Prusa…) did a comparison between one of the cheaper Objets and a vanilla Prusa and it printed at a higher resolution than the Objet. So final quality is actually higher on DIY machines if you take some time to calibrate them; just today Hackaday.com had a post up on the Ultimaker which prints at an insane 0.02mm layer height, which is beyond bonkers (my Prusa is set to 0.4mm).
The drawback for the RepRap (or Makerbot / Ultimaker) is that as with all open source projects you’ll have a hard time getting proper support for the machine, and will have to have someone on site to support and service the machine. Quality-wise though, if you get a RepRap Mendel Prusa or an Ultimachine, you’re set, and the the potential of a deeper knowledge and appreciation of the technology and possibility should outweigh the option of having phone support.
Also, it goes without saying that the process will go much smoother if the department has me on retainer for six months or so and bring me over for a workshop or two…
Yeah I saw that thing on hackaday and was quite impressed by the little yoda, its apparently very quick.
By the way, how is the noise, the smell and any other bad environment effects? If I built my own could I keep it running in my tiny apartment, or would it drive the neighbours insane?
The noise isn’t too bad. I haven’t heard the commercial ones run so can’t compare, but the Makerbot and two RepRaps I’ve seen are quiet enough to have running in the background with little bother. Occasionally some springs or motors would rattle, but that’s usually indicative of something being off, rather than normal usage. The smell has been negligible when I’ve been using PLA, but you’ll get some smoke before you get the proper temperatures set. Can’t imagine neighbours being bothered by it.