Parts In Australia

Hi all,

Love the project and i want to get involved.

A couple of questions,
Has Anyone in australia (preferably Victoria) got a working unit that they could print me the required parts?

Does Anyone know where in australia to get some suitable stepper motors and a approx cost?

Thanks guys

Firstly, we haven't achieved self-replication yet, so you'll have to d-i-y a bit, build a repstap, or maybe buy a sherline or one of the questionable little clisby mills.

I did a bit of poking around on cnczone.com looking for steppers in australia.

promising discussion:
[www.cnczone.com]

also Try
[www.oceancontrols.com.au]
and
[www.automationdirect.com.au]
(if you can find their prices.)
[secure.oatleyelectronics.com]
(none in stock this time)
[www.pro.com.sg]
(ships cheaply to au)

Thanks for the motor info, i'll look into that a bit later (it sunday arvo my brain isn't quite working at full speed).


what do you mean by in can't self replicate yet? i realise that it can't make everything but from all i've read on the wiki it seems to be a functional machine. Is it not able to print it's plastic parts?

P.S. Sebastien where in oz are you?

moonspud Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> what do you mean by in can't self replicate yet? i
> realise that it can't make everything but from all
> i've read on the wiki it seems to be a functional
> machine. Is it not able to print it's plastic
> parts?
>

Well, this is sort of where we're at right now.
[reprap.org]
We're not done getting it working yet. Once everything works, then it will be able to print its own plastic parts.


> P.S. Sebastien where in oz are you?
Ottawa. (Canada)

I may be being dense here but if it can make the extruder parts why can't it make the rest?

They've made one part, and IIRC the dimensional accuracy wasn't quite up to par without some manual adjustments. A lot of current research is on consistency

moonspud Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I may be being dense here but if it can make the
> extruder parts why can't it make the rest?

The Mk II extruder parts are fairly straightforward to print and were successfully printed by Vik's Zaphod reprap machine many months ago and my own Tommelise repstrap machine printed modified parts several months after that.

I understand that more than a few parts for the Darwin cartesian positioning system are impossible to print without having a support material extruder to go along with the Mk II polymer extruder. That presents the several of us who have working repstrap machines with a problem.

Another problem is that while you can print fairly straightforwardly with CAPA, which we don't have a stock of, HDPE, which I am using is considerably more tricky to print with.

SOI Sentinel Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> They've made one part, and IIRC the dimensional
> accuracy wasn't quite up to par without some
> manual adjustments. A lot of current research is
> on consistency

That's not so. Vik made a complete set of Mk II parts out of CAPA on Zaphod. He was able to use those directly.

I made a polymer pump of modified design out of HDPE.

RE:
Does Anyone know where in australia to get some suitable stepper motors and a approx cost?

I got my from farnell.com.au... not on the wed site had to email them and get a quote
$300AUD for the 3 steppers a $11AUD to ship them.

also look at the cost of bearing... the Y bearing quoted at $15AUD each.. I made a mod and used $2AUD bearing..

BarryGlen.

cool will have to save my pennys and get some of these.

Barry have you got a working machine?

Forrest Higgs Wrote:
> I understand that more than a few parts for the
> Darwin cartesian positioning system are impossible
> to print without having a support material
> extruder to go along with the Mk II polymer
> extruder. That presents the several of us who
> have working repstrap machines with a problem.

Isn't the Zaphod machine supposed to solve this problem? You have one plastic extruder, and one paste extruder, both working on the part, with the paste extruder pumping out water soluble support material. Has this been tried?

Moosnspud,

I have not got the machine working as yet... waiting on the stepper to come in..



have been playing with the paste extruder, trying flour and water / playdoh, have tryed different flour and mixtures, going to try starch in the mix next..

Barry

I have been working with BarryGlen to help make the darwin.

we are making the blocks out of wood for now.

PIC Programmer - the Velleman P8048 PIC programmer will program the 648A - about $119 from jaycar thou - not to mention it won't work from a USB serial port.

The PIC's and Stepper Drivers we got from RS components

BarryGlen is getting the rod bits this week is it Baz ??

Anyway - goin to dedicate a section of my website to our efforts, including where we sourced what we got etc. [dudley.selfip.net]