I am still waiting on my acceptance into the builders blog. I am ready to blog my test on the heat resistance of the ceramic insulation Larry sent me. I used a small torch with a 1200 degree flame and after 5 straight min of direct exposure onto the surface of the insulation I noticed no signs of deterioration, melting or charing. I have photos and much more to blog about.by SCphotog - General
I think the OSHA papers I read on the Fiberglass were talking about the airborne fibers being more dangerous in a silicosis way than a carcinogenic way.by SCphotog - General
The fibers in the sample Larry sent me seemed to be fairly tightly packed and do have some type of bonding agent holding them together. The same dangers present themselves with fiberglass insulation. Several years back my grandfathers construction company got a huge fine from OSHA and DHEC for not requiring employees to wear respiratory, eye, and skin protection when installing blown-in fiberglasby SCphotog - General
Reprap could print for astronomy: Larger collimation knobs for those of us with Newtonian scopes. Would have to insert a nut in the knob some how. Dovetail mounts (once we figure out support materials) Protection boxes to hold individual eyepieces Mounting rings to hold green laser pointers. Eyepiece holder for mounting on rocker box or tripod legs capable of holding 5+ eyepieces Those areby SCphotog - General
Recently Larry Pfeffer requested a sample of the Ebony Star Laminate* samples I mentioned in an earlier post. The samples in that post were offered to anyone who requested them. I simply required a SASE be mailed to me. In his request he offered me 2 Oillite bushings in return for the samples. Being that I have been toying around with an extruder design I greatly accepted. To my surprise he alsby SCphotog - General
I noticed that. I dont want to run the fans over 12V. Can the Circuit be modified to do the following? 0-3V red 3-7V blue 7-12V Green?by SCphotog - Controllers
Thanks nophead. I posted this questions over on 2 other electronics forums I frequent and got vastly complex answers. Yours was by far the simplest and cheapest way to go. I even had one guy suggest that I use an arduino to control a simple tri color led. I knew it was not as hard as they made it seem. I will be sure to post a photo of the finished product when its ready.by SCphotog - Controllers
I am working on a custom computer case for my buddy as a surprise gift for when he returns home from Iraq. He is a big gamer and I have been building him a gaming computer over the last few months. I am almost finished with the case and now need a way to control the fans. Instead of buying an off the shelf and over priced rheobus I decided to build one that would fit my needs. The simple circuitby SCphotog - Controllers
I have been working on the tech drawings over the last few days. It has been on and off and only when I got bored of visiting with the family. I am here for 5 more days and I am going to try and finish with the drawings and 3d renders by then because when I get back home I have to begin marketing heavily for the upcoming wedding season.by SCphotog - Reprappers
I just do not see the extruder nozzle (the actual hole) being accurately centered in the tip with out proper machine set ups. For the average joe a traditional extruder like the ones we are using now would work just fine. A granule hopper is not something most people would need. It would be beneficial to those who set their machine printing a spool of parts and want to walk away for several hourby SCphotog - Mechanics
I would be interested in the new electronics info since I am getting close to purchasing the electronics kit.by SCphotog - Reprappers
Found out what the problem was. Alibre was importing the .DXF files in inches rather than mm. I switched the default unit to mm and all is fine. I am dimensioning the technical drawings with both Metric and Standard dimensions so it will be easy for us Americans and also the rest of the world to read.by SCphotog - Reprappers
ok I had to divide the dimensions by 25.37 to get the correct measurement with an accuracy of .001. Well here goes a long night. I have nothing better to do anyway.by SCphotog - Reprappers
Rick, are your x, y, z, and vertical stages the same as the ones listed in the McWire sticker pack that can be downloaded from sourceforge? If so I would love those dimensions. Nophead I will give that a try.by SCphotog - Reprappers
Some of us go the easy(er) rout and build a rep(s)trap first. The rep(s)trap will in tern allow us to print the darwin parts. The only hard part about building the reprap or rep(s)traps seems to be making the extruder barrel reliable and not failure prone. While I am no where near the point of printing anything I am well on the way to having the mechanics done. I have been building things sinceby SCphotog - Reprappers
Wade, I was just going off of a report I saw on cnn a few weeks back about the OLPC program and Bush was at an event in 2006 speaking about the No Child Left Behind act and spoke for a few minutes about the OLPC program and IIRC he mentioned that it was part of his NCLB program. I could have heard him wrong tho. I rarely pay any attention when he speaks anymore. A quick Google search confirby SCphotog - Controllers
Ok this is getting old. I am trying to design the rest of the McWire Parts in Alibre design and can not find any info on the dimensions of some of the components. I spent 4 hours this morning trying to find the correct dimensions of placement of mounting holes and actual part dimensions and came up empty. I have loaded the sticker .DXF files as well as the stage src files into Alibre, Sketchup, 3by SCphotog - Reprappers
I think what they are saying is that without ample processing power and a normal amount of ram that the machine will pause for a second when the cpu switches processes to something else. It happens with anything connected to your serial or USB ports. If I am exporting photos to my external hard drive and I load something like WMP or photoshop the cpu will briefly pause the data going to the exterby SCphotog - Controllers
I was thinking about this some more last night. The auger would have to be 2 inches or so from the first heat zone. With that known we could machine the 2 heat zones (hz 1 barrel diameter and hz2 necked down for the nozzle) out of copper. Then we could machine the barrel out of a poor thermal conductor like stainless steel or even carbon fiber. We could use a heat resistant paste (welders use thiby SCphotog - Mechanics
For what people are going to pay for injection molded parts from a big company they could build a simple McWire and print enough parts for 2 Darwins and still have enough $$ left over for a week or 3 worth of beer. I have figured the total cost for my McWire to be in the $500 range and after that initial investment I am predicting a final cost to build a Darwin for around an additional $250-300.by SCphotog - For Sale
There is some good information in this thread. I plan on mocking up an auger and a barrel in the near future and testing my theory. It will take some time to finish as I will have to source out a machinist to turn the heat zone 1, the barrel and the tip. As soon as I get that done it should be as simple as making the auger, forming the hopper out of thick flashing, and designing and building theby SCphotog - Mechanics
I guess I will just build another AM2 rig. I should be able to put one together with onboard graphics for less than $100. 2gb of ram is dirt cheap now. I have 2 old eIDE 80gb hard drives and a 2.2ghz athlon x2 processor I could use. Then to just throw in a cheap sata dvd drive and a copy of xp and would have a running reprap only computer for less than $100. Ill wait until I am almost finished wiby SCphotog - Controllers
There was discussion in a thread about a powdered metal (bronze maybe?) that is suspended into a sacrificial paste like substance that can be printed and then fired in a ceramics kiln to solidify the metal. I searched briefly for the thread but did not find it. This of course would prevent the embedding of this metal into plastic parts because they would melt and turn to carbon during the kilnby SCphotog - General
freds I will take the breakout shield. I don't have a UPS account tho. I'll be more than happy to pay for shipping through another method tho.by SCphotog - Controllers
What are the requirements for the computer to run the reprap? The reason I am asking is that I have a few single core AMD athlon 64 processors and a few motherboards they will fit in and 4gb of the old 184 pin ddr ram. I was thinking that I could bring the parts back home with me when I leave from here and build a dedicated reprap computer. Do you think a 2ghz processor, 4gb of ram and an old 760by SCphotog - Controllers
Well you would have to write in some reconstruction algorithms that could match up the edges of the break and digitally reconstruct the broken part then print a new part.by SCphotog - Reprappers
Since a good deal of us reprappers and repstrappers are electronics geeks I think we could get a The Great Internet Migratory Box of Electronics Junk aka Tgimboej going on. A Tgimboej is a USPS flat rate box full of electronic stuffs that you can not bring your self to throw away but also might not use in the near future. It is a way to share components, and other electronics stuff with friends aby SCphotog - General
Man I hope they are still in stock when I get back home. I should have a nice fat check waiting on me from the University I shoot sports for. I spent a little more on Christmas presents this year than I had planned. But my mother will love her new iPhone right? And I just had to get my pregnant sister and her husband a Wii right? And I just absolutely had to build my self a new computer and buy aby SCphotog - Controllers