Free As In Steins

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

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

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

Essentually every time that the reprap is brough up as a news story, at least one comment says "it'll soon be used for sex toys".

Yes....yes it will.

It's a simple fact the when it comes to technology, two things really can drive a new technologies development. Violence and sex.

Violence generally is an unpleasant thing by pretty much universal agreement, and frankly the reprap is about making the world a better place. Yes violence gave us better Radar,plenty of malaria meds,jets and nuclear power but we'd rather be avoiding that for the reprap, a sentiment that pretty much everyone agrees on in the reprap community.

And onto sex...it is truely an awesome thing. And people often like a little assistance for either when they're with another person(known by the technical term of "it's business time" or going solo. As long as it doesn't overtake the rest of your life, sex is just an awesome thing generally. And when it comes to assistance, it can sometime cost alot of money and time to find the thing that suits yourself (or your partner) perfectly. Something isn't quite long enough? That Bulge isn't is quite the right place? Just edit the original file and have another go. Thingiverse does not allow sex stuff on it (for a reason, probably so the site won't be thrown in with porn sites on filters)

Anyway, the current reprap is unable to directly make anything thats safe for use inside of a person (outside is another issue, but we won't get into that). So how can it be used. Quite simply in fact. Just print yourself a mould and fill it with the right type of rubber resin or medical grade silicon (there are plenty of website which describe this, source the actual material from them).

Anyway, onto the pictures, I haven't made it yet, but this is a proof of concept. You print two of these and then screw the two pieces together then fill into the open end. It's actually a very short piece, about 9cm long, mostly because I wanted to reduce warping and to make it makerbotable.

The stl file can be found here

Major factors in printing this is:

-Don't bother giving it a high fill, fill it to the minimum that will work and be done with it. I'm having a go at printing with .15 fill and seeing if this works.

-Make sure the whole thing is watertight. I recommend pulling back the speed of your print by 1-3mm because this will make the whole build much more watertight to keep either the silicon or rubber in it's place while it sets. Another method to ensure a solid watertight piece is to adjust your layer thickness. If the piece isn't watertight, try getting the piece and lowering the thickness by .01 or .02 mm. This will often show up as a much stronger bond.

-If you simply bolting 4 of these together you could make a much more reasonably sized piece, simply build a hole along it's long axis would work, though warping would effect it a bit.

-This design is only suitable for vaginal use(if used for that, see next point for my little legal disclaimer). It's base is not flared and thus would be easily lost if use anally

-I offer no guarentees or recomendations for the use of this file. If it's illegal to make or sell sex toys where you live (sadly this is true even in some modern countries) then I recomend you don't do it. Also This is legally a novelty item and for legal reasons I cannot recommend that they get used for their obvious use.

-Have lots of fun with this.

And cos I feel like saying it again....it's business time!

The makerbot version 1.6 firmware includes a PID controller. This is designed based on a makerbot extruder, which used nicrome and kapton tape.