Here’s something that I didn’t think about. I had skipping on extruder as well as Y & X, but hadn’t thought that the pulley grub screw needed a flat surface to press against. Here I was thinking that the heat was melting the inner bore and allowing slippage (which might still be happening) but filing the motor shafts flat hadn’t occurred to me. Lucky me there’s an instructional video on the process, which seems straightforward enough.
→ Filing flat a motor shaft: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBnKPEnt9a4
Regardless, I’m still getting metal pulleys, and having looked at how coarse the T5 belt is and how it’s jumping on my printed pulleys, I’m probably moving to T2.5 belts. Now if I could only find a local source of the stuff which didn’t cost a fortune, I’d be set. On IRC I spoke with some guy in Poland who was buying and shipping the stuff, but couldn’t get a quote from him. And the pulleys had to be hand drilled, which seems a bother if there are pre-drilled ones available. Suggestions are welcome; the ones I’ve found so far seem too expensive for what it is, I mean, how much can diecasting pulleys cost?
Someone is starting to assemble a guide for beginners into the art and magic of building a RepRap, and it’s off to a good start. If you want an overview of the build process, check out reprapbook.appspot.com. I wish that page had been live when I started out, but you know what? Back then we didn’t have fancy e-books but read the wiki and begged in chats, and we would count ourselves lucky!