Building a Prusa Mendel I3 - Need some hands on help

Guys,

I am in the process of building my first kit, I chose the Prusa Mendel I3 standard waterjet cut plate kit from Norcalreprap. I am running in to problems as I have never built anything like this before. A lot of the issues are revolving around the fact that there are 6 or 8 different sets of instructions on line ( some better than others) and I am having to pick pieces out of each different set of instructions. I have a lot of small questions but important ones that I am running in to.

I am wondering if anyone is doing build days for RepRaps any more around the bay area. Is there a way to get some hands on help building this kit. I just cant afford to accidently destroy a part of the kit that I will have to struggle to replace. I would also like to know some of the tricks to dialing it in the right way.

Any help or advice you guys could give me would be super helpful.

Mark

Mark,

I started on mine last week, but one of my coworkers is building the same kit and we have been collaborating.

Here is my advice. First, use some acetone and a qtip on some of the tight places that the plastic doesn't fit as you are assembling. For other places, you can use a keyhole file... they are about the same size as the M3 screws and works really well. If all else fails, you can use a heater or something else to melt the plastic... but only do that in extreme cases (like when you need to put a nut into a hole).

For acetone, a little bit goes a long way. I used it to put the rods into the plastic pieces.

For most of the assembly, the animation link works really, really well. The extruder is a lot different, but once you get to the point that you are assembling the extruder, you should be a bit more comfortable with the materials and have a better idea what you are looking at.

Third... and this is very important... make sure that you have everything. Both my coworker and I were missing a thermistor. Also, the norcalreprap page says that they include everything except glass, clips and plastic... but my coworker and I both needed to buy additional m3 bolts, polyimide (kapton) tape, heat transfer gel and wires from amazon. That set back our builds by about a week or two.

Also, the norcalreprap folks didn't reply to my email about installing the endstops... so I am having to improvise on some things.

I'll be finishing my build this weekend and let you know if anything else comes up.

Spears,

thank you so much for the help with this. Is there any way you might be able to send me over the order you placed for the wires so I can get ehead of ordering some for my build, I already have the tape and I think i can figure out the bolts and the heat transfer gel

Mark

I just bought 18 guage stranded speaker wire at radio shack.

I found a good way to get in touch with the norcalreprap guys is to go on to the irc channel [webchat.freenode.net] and then directly Query Bill11 . I beleive he is William, the owner of Norcal reprap and he is very good about responding to questions. I have the endstops but still need some instruction on how to mount them also, please shoot me an email with a good link if you find one. mbolding@taylorfarms.com

thanks