Hello World!

Thinking about the best point to start with my attempt on a proto builder device, I decided best to start here!.

To give you a short introduction about my person best fits to say " I'm a modeller and precision mechanics by heart "!


First of all: my name is Hansjoerg!

When I started RC modelling ( avionics) in 2000 I was in need of a capable CAD system fitting to the needs of free form surface modelling, so since that time I'm busy "riding the white Rhinoceros" ( working with Rhino 3D).



At the beginning and the following years I built the planes I designed by printing out the parts on paper and hand cutting them off the stock, but then decided to setup a router to manufacture the parts with higher precision and lower personal effort.

Planar parts got boring and so I made my experiments with pand heatmolds for closed cell foams



After some variations in size and material strength as molding material ( the little STUKA is about 3.05grams of total weight including reeiver motor lithium accu and actuators)I felt that this activity had shown ist limitations!



So I changed to some more tooling and finally to this little project ( which was my latest one)



Now , after finishing this project and searching for new fields of engagement I cheaply bought some ball rails of superb quality on ebay which would perfectly fit to a prototyping device of non defined kind.

So I joined this forum to learn more - especially about the electronics and software things, I did not invest that much time in over the last few years.

Now , I hope this introduction did not take too long, but shows up a little about my history and background!

Have a good time building ( as I would like to have)!

Yours Hansjoerg

Those are some impressive projects, Hansjoerg. Welcome to the RepRap community! Are you thinking you'd like to get into 3D printing?

Hello Pointedstick!

Sure I would like to ( very sure): I did some research in several directions:

Laser Sinter Technologies:
The issues within this: very expensive poly amide powder; and the cancerogenious fumes while sintering; ( one has also to get rid of those not to block the laser light or affect the optics negatively); ... to get really fast - you would need a 30 W to 40 W laser power which I think could be rather dangerous for a hobbyist and piezo mirrors which are also VERY costly including the arbitrary piezo power control source! ( Diode lasers and 3 axis movement system would also work, but be much slower and the collimation optics would probably have a very short lifetime close to the generated fumes) .

Second principle was gypsum printing which would be possible ( I found ruby nozzles down to 0.03mm to plot water over a layer of gypsum but diffusion and soaking would be much more difficult to handle then in the thermal case of FDM systems .

Photoreactive resine and masking : the photoreactive resine is rather dangerous (cancerogenious and mutagenious) as the reactive trip ( enthalpy) is very little !


So it finally seems that the only possible way would be in case of costs; of danger and feasibility would be the FDM principle!

Regarding the mechanics I'm pretty sure, that I will be able to make that!

Regarding the electronics - guess I can do this but Arduino and Co are pretty new fields of Engagement - not sure where to start and to end -

even not sure what exisits and what I would have to do myself..


But that's why I'm here - to learn!!


Hansjoerg