Community College Student Needs Help!

Hello! I am an engineering student at the Spokane Falls Community College, and this quarter I have a project class that I would love to build a 3D printer for.

If I was able to get one up and running I would print off the parts I need for a Mendel and donate the printer to the college, but I am not sure where to start. My budget is pretty small (starving college student and all), but I'm pretty handy and don't mind scrounging a bit.

So far I am thinking that my best bet is to build a simple RepStrap to print the parts for a true Mendel. Alternatively, if someone has a working printer that would be willing to print off the parts I need, I would be able to build a Mendel to start with.

I think it would be great to get a 3D printer up and running at my college so future students could print up their CAD designs and possibly their own printers, but it may be out of the picture financially.

What do you guys think? How best should I pursue this? Thank you in advance for any help

Jacob

The price for a set of printed parts on eBay is not massive compared to the cost of the electronics and motors, etc, which you need for a repstrap anyway. I may be biased because I sell parts, but I don't see the point of a repstrap nowadays. It is a lot more effort to make one and also some materials cost, which if you are going to then build a Mendel is wasted. Unless your time is really worth nothing to you, you will get there much faster by missing out the repstrap stage.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

I've been wondering about that myself, nophead.

A fair number of folk do up a WolfStrap:
http://reprap.org/wiki/WolfStrap-English

and then, from there, once they have that machine working, some of them do up a Mendel and so on. Others just keep the WolfStrap.

I think part of this is sort of a cargo cult, Mendel a the holy grail approach.

I also think this means, Mendel is just better than WolfStrap, and that we need a better repstrap, like the
http://reprap.org/wiki/T-Slot bots we've been cheerleading.

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-Sebastien, RepRap.org library gnome.

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