Is this old news? and current projects made from it It looks like another cartesian coordinate bot, but this one works with a plunger based system. Using soft materials that can cure like epoxy... or food materials like frosting, soft cheese, jam, and chocolate. Definately lower resolution than reprap, and no goal of self replication... but looks like a good place to start to repstrap.by Labrat - General
Project update: I've had some limited successes with my lego duplication proof of concept project... but nothing quite so spectacular that its worthy of a blog. Though at the moment I do have a less than perfect duplicate of a 2x1 lego piece (deep) cast from a polypropylene Olivio container and 3 bumps worth of shallow 1 bump wide lego cast from a polypropylene Rx bottle (clear orange). Observby Labrat - Casting and Moldmaking Working Group
QuoteWade I suspect at this point if you can get your hands on a set of parts to make the molds, you're probably better off just using the parts to build a reprap and print the copied parts out yourself. And right there you've identified the conundrum. At the moment, putting together a reprap is as much of a social engineering challenge as it is an ENGINEERING engineering challenge. There is cby Labrat - Casting and Moldmaking Working Group
The talk on this thread is starting to remind me of an article I came across recently about a researcher who was able to produce microfluid chips on the cheap using a laser printer and shrinky dinks: effectively replacing the need for $100,000 worth of equipment. I know this doesn't directly answer any of the problems brought up so far (the need for appropriate materials to use to extrude conby Labrat - General
I'm taking a close look at the Mendel pieces in an attempt to see how many I can make from sources other than a reprap. I noticed that there are several pieces with holes shaped like a teardrop (see x-180-z-bearing-plate_2off.stl for an example). Do these special shape of hole have a structural purpose? They're probably going to be pretty difficult to produce to any degree of accuracy usingby Labrat - Reprappers
Thanks for the feedback and all the tips. The writeup on moldmaking that Sebastien pointed to looks quite useful. Although there was one other part to my project that I didn't mention. I'm trying to do this with limited resources (i.e. funding). It would be awesome to have an unlimited supply of RTV silicone. But that stuff goes for around $20 per pound (approx 12 fluid ounces). I'm startinby Labrat - Casting and Moldmaking Working Group
I have an idea for reproducing reprap parts without a reprap. I plan to use air-cure silicone (available at Home Depot and other hardware stores in caulking gun tubes) to make a reusable mold of already existing pieces to cast duplicates out of plastic (probably using polypropylene or polyethylene... whatever I can pull out of the plastics recycling bin). First I'm going to try a proof of conceby Labrat - Casting and Moldmaking Working Group
I downloaded the STL files for Mendel and converted them to 3DS format to be able to see them... unfortunately I completely lost the scale for the pieces in the process (viewing them in Sketchup shows the larger pieces being several feet across). Can someone please give me the measurement of one of the pieces so I can get these in the right scale? Specifically, can someone give me the Length, Wby Labrat - General Mendel Topics