Day One.
I’ve been meaning to blog my efforts to make a reprap machine. So my son forced me to join Tumblr!
Reprap stands for Rapid Replicator. It can make plastic parts by laying down successive layers of plastic by moving forward/back, right/left, up/down while squeezing a melted plastic through a nozzle.
Check out: http://www.reprap.org/bin/view/Main/RepRapOneDarwin
I was all excited when I found this thing! It’s not really ready to go. You have to get or make the plastic pieces to assemble it so you can make more pieces for somebody else to build a better one. No Way!
I wanted a way to make the pieces without having a reprap or buying all the pieces to start.
Spent a lot of time on google.
Found:http://www.instructables.com/id/EBZ3QQVF3HY3SL2/and again was excited. $600 was way too much and it was way too complex.
Did a lot of research on diy cnc which led to http://www.cnczone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12681 so I bought a couple of heavy duty drawer guides and went to the shop to see what I could do with them. Real possibilities.
Ran into another site for building a Repstrap. That’s what I was building. A machine to build a reprap! He calls his machine Tommelise. Why? See http://www.3dreplicators.com/
After a few days on google-Sketchup I had what I though would be a working drawing for a repstrap similar to Tommelise but with a moving x-axis.
Built it wrote some test software for my arduino http://www.arduino.cc/ and, in a couple of weeks, realized that the moving x axis on the light weight frame I had built just would not work! Dead ends every where.
The same meddlesome son said, “Why don’t you make it like the other guy’s?”, so I did. Well, the same but different.
Pictures to come after figuring out HOW!
Enough for Day One anyway.
