An 80/20 RepRap?

Has anyone thought to make a RepRap using an extruded aluminum structural material like what 80/20 sells?

Extrudable aluminum is suitable for building a RepStrap (bootstrap 3D printer). It's more expensive than using steel rod and home-printed plastic hardware like corner connectors, which is what we're doing with Darwin, the RepRap design. It's also more expensive than making a RepStrap from wood (~<USD$200 for the mechanical parts, maybe), but may also be more convenient; so you'd be trading money for time. For some people, it will make sense to do it one way, for others, the other ways.

Here are some resources I just dug up on extruded aluminum; this subforum on cnczone is dedicated to building extruded-aluminum-based cnc machines and will be a primary resource:
[www.cnczone.com]

Here is a link to 8020's surplus/discount site on ebay:
[stores.ebay.com]

According to some discussion on makezine, TSLOTS is also nice to work with, although I don't know if they have slides and bearings.
[www.makezine.com]
[www.futuraind.com]

See also mcmaster.com - "Structural Framing Systems" pages 1586-1589. If you're in a city of any size, your local industrial suppliers may carry some variety of extruded aluminum, I suppose.

I personally would go with building a repstrap from wood or buying a hobby cnc router/mill myself.

Thanks for the links!

I very much am considering the idea of mounting an extruder to CNC mill and I'm following the build blog with much interest. However, I don't already own a desktop CNC mill and all the ones I could find in Austria were expensive... very expensive.

So that's why I was contemplating something 'in between' the steel rods gig and the supper cool TAIG CNC.

What about the proxxon mills? They're small, but fairly inexpensive, and made in Europe. _Assuming_ they have enough travel to fabricate all the darwin parts. (I'm not sure about that.)

Here's a CNC converted proxxon mill.
[www.indoor.flyer.co.uk]

As a note, proxxon makes a stand-alone compound table for USD$100. I can't tell from the picture how difficult it would be to attach stepper motors the leadscrews of it.
[www.woodcraft.com]

You may be able to find someone making an inexpensive hobby CNC router. This is an american one which goes for USD$200-300 on ebay. I don't know if you can find anything like that in europe or not. I'm not able to research this online in non-English languages.
[cgi.ebay.com]
[myworld.ebay.com]

I'll start a thread on cheap hobby cnc routers.

I had looked at the proxxon line and concluded it was too small and too much like a drill press.

I've looked through ebay (de & at) and seen a few promising things but nothing that seemed so suited as the smaller TAIG

There are also a variety of gantry mills for sale in Austria but all of them have a short Z axis. However bolting a gantry mill on top of a Z axis table is an interesting Frankenstein like idea... provided it was still precise enough to mill a printed circuit board. I have to admit at this point this appeals to me

Sebastien, those CNC rooters look really nifty!
[cgi.ebay.com]

I wonder with a 165$ starting bid on ebay, how expensive this could en up being and how much more would it cost to make it a RepStrap. I'm guessing 200$ for the stepper motors, plus some adjusting and building....

Right now i'm really wondering if i should wait for the Darwin kit to be available or if i should go RepStrap with one of these. I'm really not that good at electronics and i don't have the good tools at home to fabricate precision parts.
I would like my cartesian robot to be really accurate, as i will be playing around with small scale printing.