Solid Edge assembly file

Hello,

I'm planning to make the Mendel in the near future. I've read about the whole process of making one, and the only problem for me seems to be the 3D printed parts. I don't want to make a RepStrap first or buy the parts, so my only option is trying to make them myself.

A great help would be the assembly in a 3D program, so I can see if I can adjust some parts in order to make them more easy to produce. I have downloaded all the Solid Edge files, and tried to load them in Autodesk Inventor and in SolidWorks. Inventor didn't do a thing, and SolidWorks only loaded part of the files for some reason.

Does anyone have the complete assembly of the Cartesian Robot m4 in Inventor, SolidWorks or .step files? Or does someone know a more easy way to open the files in SolidWorks? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

-Niels

Apart from Ed's Solid Edge original, the other GA that's available is a vrml that's drifting about on the wiki somewhere. It gives a clear idea of the parts, but so do the pictures and instructions with the assembly guides. If you want to modify the parts to suit your own purposes, I'm confident that SolidWorks will import .stl, and those individual part files are clearer to work with individually than in the aggregated assembly.

There should be a step file of the entire assembly here....
[reprap.svn.sourceforge.net]



Rhys

Thanks, roj! Didn't realise that was there, whatever search terms I tried weren't the right ones.

Thank you very much for the link to the Step file roj20, it's perfect! And thank you too for the reply murd you guys are great

-Niels

I can probably do some outputs of this so that those without Solid Works can still view the whole assembly.

Before I do that,
What colour would you like to see the printed part?
What colour to make the laser cut parts (brownish)?
What colour would you like the screws to be?

One small problem, can anyone confirm that the step file has broken links to parts, thus they are not showing on import?

The step file is working perfectly here, no reports of broken links or anything. I don't know what you mean by "do some outputs", but I think the colors don't really matter as long as they are obviously different from each other?

I checked with a couple of programs and, take an example from the top of my head as my computer is in a box over Christmas, the z axis and x axis stepper motors are missing.

The output would be eDrawings which is much better to see fine details, and vrml to use in a browser plugin

You're right about the steppers. The vrml file has them. I used Alibre to produce a 3D pdf from the STEP. My version of Alibre doesn't differentiate colours for the pdf assembly, but it's quite lucid even without, and swinging the pdf model is a lot more responsive than the vrml is in Cortona.