>
> - What progress has been made on the RepRap, and
> how far is it from complete self-replication
> (minus imported parts, of course)?
I would guess I'm less than a month away from starting to test printing my own parts. I'm hopeful that the testing phase will be less than a month then I'll be printing my own parts with no issues (I've spend the 6 months getting to this point, working on it mainly over weekends in a piece-meal fashion).
Vik Olliver (at the other end of New Zealand to me, go kiwis!) is quite a bit further on but seems to be more concerned with smoothing out issues for the rest of us rather than immediately printing out a full set of parts
> - Does it only use plastic right now?
There are a number of people working on different kinds of plastic but you are substaintially right. We're concerntrating on plastic at the moment to get to the point of self replication, then then next goal is to get printed circuits and other materials working.
> - What are the different major ways of
> constructing a RepRap/RepStrap? What is a support
> extruder and which designs include one?
People have run the gambit from making a RepStrap from Lego/Mechano to wood to metal. The current faviourite is the 'seedling' Repstrap. You can get some instructions on that by following the link on the main wiki (reprap.org).
I would suggest at this point that you do with building the full Darwin if you're thinking it will take you a couple of months to get to the point where you need the plastic printed parts. Currently you can buy the parts but they're quite expensive compared to what they will be when a lot of people are printing parts.
The support extruder is needed if you're going to print something that has a part hanging out in the air. The idea is that it puts down some sort of water soluble solid for the overhanging part to hang on to (i.e. be supported by, hence the name).
The support extruder has been a little neglected till now and there a couple of people trying to redesign the reprap parts to be able to be printed without one.
Ultimately though, if you don't want to be severely constrained in what you print you will have to include it.
> - Keeping in mind that I'm completely new to this,
> what would be a good way for me to join in on the
> project? I have tried to install the host software
> (for WinXP), but I'm having some trouble getting
> it set up -- I suspect that I have not installed
> the external Java packages properly.
See [
forums.reprap.org] for where you might want to put them. If you can't easily fix it however, there are plans afoot to make that particular issue a thing of the past so if you're not really interested, just leave it and move on to something else
Have a look round and see what your skillset is suited to. Chances are you'll be totally overwhelmed by the quality of people attracted to this project and think you can't really do anything (thats what I thought :-)
If nothing else though, if you keep a spreadsheet of where you get all the materials you buy, what the product code was and how much you paid etc. you'll be able to help out your friends and others in your geographic area when it comes time to help them build one.
I would suggest you learn from my mistakes and not just buy things one at a time but split everything into the 3 main components: electronics, extruders, and cartesian bot (along with software of course), pick one (I'd suggest starting with the electronics) and get a full list of the what you'll need and start buying.
As you put things together you may hit some issues. Just post to the forums and somebody will try to help. Try to figure it out for yourself first though, and see if its a hole in the documentation you've slipped through, in which case tell us and the documentation will be changed to suit.