Cheltenham Upstart

Hello,

Thought id introduce my self

Im Rob, 21 and im an Apprentice by nature

I work with a Dimension, a Prodigy Scrap that it got chucked last week in favour of a Fortus and a Eden.

I saw Rep rap when Darwin first self replicated and though "wow what a great idea"

3 years later I thought id give it a go, so i'm building a Mendel Prusa, With Ramps Electronics.

Work weren't game for printing a set but at £300/kg or ABS filament i cant blame them,

Thankfully Nophead was kind enough to sort me a set out, if i'm honest i'm really impressed with them, they really do give our machines a run for there money, So thanks,

Rep rap store have supplied most fixings and bar etc, work the odds and sods for extruder and springs etc.

And ive also been able to knock up some alignment bars and other odds and sods, i do intend to turn my hot end at work at some point as well.

So far:

The frame is together (thanks to the pictorial guide)

Stepper motors are install in all but the extruder and the 3 axis move well (some minor tweaking to go i suspect)

All but the Pololu drivers have arrived and are awaiting soldering, in the mean time the Ardunio has been fun to play with, and did take a copy of the firmware which reprap host, repersnaper both connected to with no problems.

For now here a few photos of of my progress in the last 2 or 3 weeks.

[www.flickr.com]

Hi Rob,

Welcome to the fun and thanks for the info. WOW that's some expensive filament!

If you really are in Cheltenham, I'm very close to you if you ever get stuck or need a hand.

Nice build photos, it looks like you are getting on well.

Rich.

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[richrap.blogspot.com]

Thanks

Yea it is expensive, and the maintenance/repair contract is upwards of 5K

Got my Ramps connected to Repersnaper Tuesday, no problems, printed a test part away from the bed to confirm all the axis moved and the extruder looked like it would extrude.

Just missing a hot end, some filament and a print bed now

Rob

Well FINALY an update!

I’ve been busy with college recently so its been sat looking at me hot endless.

Finally built it up last week at work and had a go at a print over the weekend.

Honestly it was a massive failure, things didn’t stick, when they did they were curling etc.

But I’m fairly sure most of my problems were related to the fact my print bed is flexing in the middle (4mm Perspex)

and my Z0 needs to be set better.

It did build a reasonable raft in the end so looking good

Ordered a 5mm Aluminium plate to back my Perspex so hopefully that will stop the flex. then i just need to follow some (all) of the wonderful guidance on here on how to level it properly.

Rob

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/27/2011 07:02AM by ijmok.

Put some resistors on the back of the aluminum to use it as heated bed. tempered glass gives a perfect build surface for such a bed.

Perspex will be an epic fail. I use just normal glass 3mm with heating up to 60C and PLA sticks brilliantly

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Experimenting in 3D in New Zealand

Ok

Update time

been a while, some good some not so good

Got my hot end built and working, all good

Used Richrap's calibration post from his blog to get Pronterface and SF41 working

and began trying to print,

Took a while to understand SF

I started using some black ABS welding rods and after a few misshapen objects i got the spiral box ive photographed. during the build, none of it finished but it worked a treet

Then got hold of some pla, should be easy right?

How wrong i was,

Although ABS had worked once (never tried it again due to the PITA nature of feeding it 50cm rods every 5 minutes.

So i Levelled my bed

Re did my E steps per mm

Tried several times to no avail.

Re read and looked through rich raps blog post, guess what saved me?

His hollow pyramid,

Ambitious i know but it showed me the problem

turns out the default retract speed 20mm/s was way to fast

I’m running it with a 1mm retract at 2.5mm/s or 150mm/min

pyramid on flicker as printed first time no trimming, pretty good, i think anyway.

so some tweaking to go but im smitten!!

Got clever and tried to print a set of PLA bushings - got to start my replication somewhere,

Power saving killed my print 1/2 way but they were looking good
Ref Perspex, im running an acrylic sheet or 2 atm, looks scrappy but its all I had, fresh on the way,

Ally is awaiting the replacement acrylic sheet ot the hole centres can be the same, and I think I’ve got some power resistors in my shed
Ill have a look and see if they are any good when im back from holiday

Thanks for all the help and advice its soo good to see it working well

Rob