I haven't made anything in a few months now. The last thing I made was the Coil Gun which took all of 3 hours to actually build and the novelty wore off in about 15 min. So I had an itch to build something. Something big. I was debating on an actual scratch build case mod, but could not justify it because I have no need for a new computer right now.
I first learned about the RepRap project via Hackaday about a year and a half ago. I immediately wanted to jump in feet first, but things were still very buggy and the longevity of the extrusion head was very short. So I sat back and contributed a few ideas here and there, did some technical drawings of stuff that was missing and mostly just sat back and watched the progress unfold. This brings us to this month.
I had not been on the reprap site in about 2 months. So with nothing to do on a Saturday afternoon I browsed the site for a few hours. Things had made leaps and bounds. There were completely new electronics that were more powerful and reliable, the extrusion head was completely redesigned to what I always thought would be a better design. The software was even refined. There were people getting printing resolutions of less than 0.1mm. I decided to go ahead and build me a RepRap.
But first I have to build what is known as a RepStrap. This is a Cartesian bot that will allow me to print the parts I need to make a more accurate and faster Darwin RepRap. This is not a necessary step as I could just buy all the parts laser cut from acrylic from a few places,[url=http://Ponoko.com]Ponoko[url] or bits from bytes and just have to supply a few mechanical parts and electronics or I could buy a ready made reprap derived 3d printer CupCake CNC. But there is no fun in that. It works great for people who are not mechanically inclined or have no tools and workspace.
So on with the work log.
This post will serve as my main build log. I will be posting all of the build updates here. I will from time to time post some small updates or thoughts on my new site. (still under construction) The Maker's Workbench