RepStrap Online!

Hey guys! Long time lurker first time poster (and printer!)

After an excessively long gestation period my McWire-based repstrap is finally online!

Still trying to figure out the right settings to get decent prints so I can make myself some Mendel parts.

Here are some pictures:

[imgur.com]

Some specs of my setup:

Cartesian robot:
Stainless Steel Threaded rod/ captive nut axis drive
Max speed 4mm/s
Print bed made of aluminum sheet covered with melted sugar

Extruder:
NEMA17 stepper (high torque from makerbot) with DIY-splined shaft and skate bearing to press filament
arduino with stepper controller for extruder controller
0.8mm nozzle made from an acorn nut on a presta valve stem (from a bike tube)
Printing natural ABS

Some problems I've had mostly relate to ooze, and my firmware doesn't do fast start/reversing so I'm thinking that's probably the source of the problem.

I'm still working on making a heated print bed but in the mean time melted sugar with a raft on top seems to work pretty well, but it needs to be replaced every five or so builds, which isn't hard but slightly annoying.

Very nice! You're gonna get tired of that 4mm/sec max speed pretty quick, though. I print at literally 20 times that for perimeters and 30 times that for infill!

Yes well that's why this is a repstrap... Intended to print out the parts for an actual reprap which works better.

Although with my leadscrew drive I get ten times the accuracy you get... Not that it really matters with my crappy print bed.

In any case I tried to print a reasonably sized object (10x40 mm footprint) on my sugar-bed and it resulted in warping and lifting the bed up about 1 cm during construction... the object came out solid surprisingly, but seriously squashed.

Hoping to get that heated bed worked out pretty soon.

The makerbot website says that masking tape works better than kapton for a bed covering, and I find that hard to believe. Does anyone have any experience with using masking tape vs kapton? It seems like a better (cheaper) alternative to me...

Kapton or glass is better with heat. Without heat, blue painters' tape works well, but only for PLA. ABS requires a heated platform.

So how well does heated masking tape work with ABS? I haven't found any conclusive data on the subject. Is it worth doing?

Try printing on an old CD or DVD with ABS.

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