Machine photos

Hi All.

I've been getting requests for photos of my machines as kits and for my assembled machines. I took out an assembled machine I was building to increase my own production rate and took a few photos with an iphone, apologies for the extreme blurryness, sadly these were the most clear of the photos. The extruder hadn't yet been attached so I could show it in detail.

 A fully assembled prusa reprap machine except for the extruder. All parts are PLA, it uses the older X-Z assembly since I find this to be easier to print and better appearing than the newer design.

And again from the side, the high powered motors used in the X and Y are visible, as well as the medium torque steppers used for the Z axis.

As can be seen here, I used Ultimachine RAMPS kits. These are supplied unassembled, along with an Arduini Mega and 4 polulu drivers. Why not make my own electronics? Because this is easier for the time being and ultimachine and RAMPS comes highly respected in the community for quality

The hot end is a PTFE barrel that is tapped which a brass heated barrel screws into. The nozzle size is .5mm, which produces a very fine filament that I have used with layers in the .25 to .4mm range. Heating is applied using woven fibreglass Nichrome wire and fire cement.

The extruder used a high torque stepper motor in a wades style design.

The gears are lasercut MDF. This is the only part of the machine which is lasercut, mainly because it is easier to do this than worry about printed gears, since this needs a very high amount of quality and is a common point of difficulty in construction and operation. With Lasercut gears they are perfect every time and problems are avoided.

Getting going selling machines

Hello everyone

Apologies to my readers for being away for so long. I've been reprapping still all this time. Printing bits and pieces. And the artifactory has gotten it's machine working long ago.

Anyway, I'm starting up on selling machines as either kits of fully assembled machines. Send me an email at letsburn00 at gmail.com for info. Currently I'm only selling to people in Perth (and possibly australia, though shipping is the issue), since this is just a side hobby for now.

I just bought a small order from china. I'm currently pretty impressed I got to say.

-Peter

Drilling Extruder barrels

When it comes to drilling extruder barrels, by far the hardest part is drilling the very fine die hole at the end. This is often a fraction of a mm and as an effect the tiny drills that you use often snap very easily if used to make a hole that is too deep. Fortunately there is a method to avoid too many breakages.

Step 1. Drill the 3.5mm hole down one end of the barrel, as deep as you dare.

Step 2. drill a hole around 1mm into the other end of the barrel. If it's done enough, then you should break through into the other side of the hole and things are alright.

step 3. If the 1mm deep hole wasn't enough, then use a sander to abraid away the end of the extruder barrel until the small hole you just drilled is almost entirely gone. Then try step 3 again. This can take a while, but saves you the time (and brass) of going too far and either breaking your ultra- fine drill bits, or drilling too deep with your 3.5mm bits.

Enjoy!

-Peter Hillier

Building an ABS build base (cross posted to builders)

During my early attempts to get my Bits from Bytes machine printing, I ended up burning a rather nasty hole into my build base when I accidentally left the machine alone with the extruder still hot. So i decided to build another cover over that one in order to protect it that would stop any more damage to the base. Simon Kirkby found a source of ABS and built a platform for his makerbot and I decided to take it full size, so it also provides a very strong ABS-ABS bond for my rafts. After 3 months of using that one it ended up too warped and damaged to use. But then that was the point, because it didn't damage the acrylic.

So with the help of Trent Lloyd I made a new one and filmed the process(Trent did a great job with the camera as well as editing the whole thing together, removing most of my pointless rambling and mistakes when we made this, though obviously plenty still remains). If you look carefully in the background you'll see some guys assembling the extruder for a makerbot in the background.

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Apologies if it gets a little confusing. I realized while we made it that due to all the glue being used, it wasn't really viable to do multiple takes if we glued it down properly, so we never ended up glueing the ABS sheet down. If you can keep track of when it's supposed to be on and off then it should all makes sense. Also, you may wish to glue down your sheet before you drill the holes, we made this in a hurry and I possibly explained that part out of order. Either way, hopefully this will help people with making their build platforms from ABS and wood. Expect a new one one how to do this with the mendel within a month or two.

Shameless plugs: This was filmed at the Perth Artifactory's (www.theartifactory.org) reprap night which occurs every second monday, next night is on December 7th. Our Mendel is flying out of my machine as fast as I can orient the stl's and print them, slowed only by the need for sleep, machine malfunctions and the demands from my boss to work.

The perth local reprap site is found at http://www.reprap-wa.org . We run a somewhat quiet mailing list currently at http://groups.google.com.au/group/reprap-wa. And I update occasionally on my reprap blog at www.freeasinsteins.com (get the joke?)

Teaser: The artifactory has decided to assemble our mendel in a single day, something we will do with a webcam running the whole time. If our internet gets running we'll webcast this, but at the very least we'll have a time-lapse of it being made for you all to see. If we web-cast we'll announce here first.

-Peter "letsburn00" Hillier

The transmission effect

For starters, there is now a working dedicated WA reprap mailing list at http://groups.google.com.au/group/reprap-wa

There is also a reprap WA website, set up by Daniel Harmsworth. It includes a maker list (mainly focussing on Reprap's and makerbots) http://www.reprap-wa.org

Reprap meetings continue every 2 weeks at the artifactory, next one is 2nd of november.

I recently managed to get my firmware issues aside, the final solution to make it all work was:

Motherboard firmware V1.4

Extruder firmware V1.6

Replicatorg 008

The old problem basically was that after a layer or two the entire machine's steppers would simply stop sending g-code (or more likely it would send a start spurt then send no more).I went to this firmware setting and it worked perfectly.

Then recently it would just stop working again(after I printed a few things). Current main theory is motor issues (I swapped out motors, but I had an issue a few minutes before that so thats up in the air.) or possibly some wierd thing going on with replicatorg. I'll report back when I've cracked it.

Anyway, when I'd fixed the problem and everything was working perfectly I made this. It was when I was printing off the very first part of the artifactories mendel.

Enjoy!

Also, a website for the artifactory at

-Peter "Letsburn00" Hillier