17/07/2013

Building the ReprapPro tricolour Mendel

What you get is many kilos of nuts, bolts threaded rod and various electronic bits. A quick unboxing can be found on my lovely wife's site here:Geekey Godmother printer unboxing.

The build itself went reasonably quickly though I will warn you that this is not a shake the box project. Taking your time and paying attention will reward you later on. Tolerances and alignment are important, fortunately the design makes it easy to make adjustments. One note for North Americans, there are a number of places where holes in printed plastic components need to be fettled - lightly reamed out by hand with a drill bit to remove any stray blobs of plastic inside. However, the components that need to go into those holes are metric. Finding metric bits proved to be much harder and more expensive than I expected. I ended up going with inch bits which worked well but I was very careful to use bits slightly smaller than their metric equivalent to avoid any sloppiness in fit.

The elecronics were straight forward but the electrics proved to be very fiddly requiring soldered connections to tiny pins. The design has been updated recently to simpler to wire and use plug connectors and I may switch over in the future. That is one of the strengths of the reprap design - it is easy to modify and update.

Having run several test and functional print with a single head. I am in the process of adding the two additional heads. For the moment, both will be for multicolour printing one each in .3 and .5 mm nozzle size. In time, the .5 will be switched over to multi-material  starting with nylon.


16/07/2013

Anticipation

For an upcoming birthday, I am getting  a 3d printer. After much research I settled on the RepRapPro Tricolour Mendel. It strikes a nice balance between ease of building and advance features while not locking me into a commercial model.

WarPrinter may strike some as an odd name. My intent is not to print out illegal firearms but rather use the printer as an adjunct to my love of tabletop and miniatures war gaming.