How many working machines exist?

Has there been a census of RepRap machines? How many are there?

Well, there's Vik Olivier's Zaphod, which has been in operation and making things since last September. Simon built up a nice reprap machine a few months later, though I didn't see that he'd blogged printing anything in particular with it. He hurt himself about then, a severed Achille's tendon if I remember correctly, a situation that I think rather restricted his activities for quite some time. Ed and Adrian got Arnie to print a shot glass early this year and a few weeks later I got Tommelise to do the same.

I expect that Adrian will be printing things with the Darwin prototype before too long if the blog entries are any guide.

I'm trying to remember. I think one other guy whose name escapes me at the moment did a bit of tentative printing with a Mk II extruder strapped to a CNC positioning system a few days back.

Zach was putting together a bootstrap machine a few months back and as best as I heard had all the pieces working but not the system. I think that he's putting together a Darwin at the moment, so he may have abandoned his old design.

I may have missed one or two, but I think that that pretty much sums of the current state of affairs. I've limited the list to machines which are more or less able to actually print things. There may be 10-20 others in various states of construction right now.

My own experience with Tommelise has shown me that it takes about twice as long to get the thing printing useful things as it does to get it built. Mind, the shot glass exercise, in hindsight is pretty easy compared to getting it to print, say, a set of Mk II parts.

This would be a neat piece of information to see on the reprap.org wiki page. A list of all of the machines currently functioning or being built. Functioning or semi-functioning machines should have pictures of an item or two that had be created on them and a link to any associated blog.

There is such a page.

[reprap.org]

It's been muddled a bit with the Introduction link on the left-hand side of the reprap.org main page. The reprap site has been doing a lot of changes lately and things aren't always where you'd expect had you known the site in the past.

Look down that link and you'll see more or less what you were suggesting. A few of the machines, like Zach's before he started working on his Darwin, you can best see in the Builder's blog.

I just asked Zach and he said that there are about 50 unique customers buying RepRap Darwin parts from the foundation at the moment.