Hello RepRap World!

Hey everyone, so I'm a newbie to this forum but I'm in the final stages of my first Prusa Build. As I quickly found out with this project, sometimes there are a great many periods of hitting stopping points haha. I'd save up to buy the motors, then it would be another few weeks before I could find time, money, and parts to make more progress. So yea, I went with the Prusa Mendel, it seemed like a fantastic design and I think the two motor design is brilliant. The only thing about the Prusa that I think needs improvement are the bushings. In checking the smoothness of travel there is a lot of "chattering" and grabbing as I slowly twist the motor shafts.

Here are a few improvement ideas for my second printer build

Like I said, I want more than the rough bushings. I think the Prusa is a great design with a lot of potential, I'd like to design a better traveler carraige. This is a huge big one I've had. The belts required aren't exactly cheap, but wire is I worked in a machine shop for the last few months and we made a machine that I fell head over heels in love with haha. It was a component for a medical test tube "pick and place" machine that picked up a test tube on the X, and Z axis with the "Y" axis a revolving cylinder of tubes. Anyways, this particular device was designed for very light load/force bearing in mind so there isn't much to learn there. The brilliant part of this machine however was the traveler design which used cable in place of belts. Instead of having a geared pully, we made a cylinder with grooves/threading for the wire to lay in. This piece fit right over the stepper motor shaft and approximately 4-5 windings of wire were wound around this part. Each movement of the stepper lengthens and shortens the wire on each side. The double pulley system directly translates this into very smooth precise movements.This used an open piece of wire with a double pulley system on the traveler carraige itself. The wire ends were fastened to the frame, with pulleys providing the movement. There is another developer (MadKite I believe) who used a very similar system with belts. I know for absolute certainty this can also be done with hardware store wire, I can't wait to make it

Well my machine is only awaiting the hot end and the plastic. I decided to go with the Gen6 electronics. I had got myself a cheap chinarduino and had planned on going with the RAMPS, but I figured I'd just use that as a development board for future projects. So I dropped some cash for the Gen6 with all the driver chips all in one spot. At the moment I'm excited yet deathly afraid of damaging my beautiful board when I wire it all up. I have an ATX with those 20 pin connectors but I've seen a lot of people using the laptop chargers, I DEFINITELY don't wanna fry my electronics so I'm thinking I should go that route. Also, I think a nice easy to use, simple control panel with some basic power switches, lights, USB, card reader, LCD screen and what not would make things more user-friendly.

Well I just wanted to say that I absolutely love this project and all the wonderful things coming out of it. Since becoming involved with the RepRap project and open source 3D printing, life seems...happier... As much bullshit and crap on the news, a group of brilliant creative people are saving the planet. So thanks to all of you guys who published their work that's helped me to make the progress I have. This technology could be bigger than the personal computer

Check out Greg Frost's Prusa fork.

He has some nice designs for x-ends and an x-carriage that use LM8UU linear bearings. I'm in the process of printing these parts out so I can use them when my bearings come in.

Make sure to open them up in OpenSCAD and not the STL. I looked at the STL not too long ago and it was stale. The OpenSCAD files are the source and should always have the latest updates.