Fairly productive day today, but didn’t spend much of it in the studio really. I popped into Ceramics at SAIC to touch base with Ben, and then went upstairs to the Fabrication Lab to laser cut some test parts for the Printrbot Plus that I am building.
I realized last week that the laser cut parts i made earlier in the year were wrong – this is one of the perils of downloading plans from the net – they don’t always match up with the project as needed. I was however able to download the Inventor files that Printrbot posted online, open those in Rhino and use them to scale the PDF files that they had also posted online which in turn i could use to laser cut. So today i did a quick check on two of the parts to make sure they were scaled correctly. And it looks pretty good. The lasercut part matches up with the Nema 17 stepper motor pretty good. On thursday i’ll cut the rest of the files and start working on the Printrbot Plus in earnest.
<facepalm>This type of messing around has been fairly typical of my experience with building a 3D printer when you do not have a complete kit. Don’t even get me started on the ongoing saga that is my Mendel Max 1.5. I learned over the weekend that total n00b me probably bought the wrong electronics board back in 2011 for this particular build and have only just realized it. :P </facepalm>
Since then i’ve built three 3d printers from kits, all from Printrbot, in addition to maintaining 5+ Makerbot machines. So i’ve got a pretty good idea now of how a lot of these machines work and go together. There’s still a huge amount to learn but i feel much more comfortable than i did back in late 2011. Tomorrow i’m going to start building a new machine – another Mendel – this time it’s Prusa i3. I bought a kit from my good friend John Abella and it looks awesome. Everything is really well documented, labelled and i’m fairly sure construction will be relatively straight forward. John’s Botbuilder project is a great entry point for people wanting to build their own machines. He hosts workshops in the Baltimore area every couple of months, and participants walk away with a working Prusa i3. I’ve been wanting to build one for a while, so i bought one from John a month or so ago to assemble at the Art Institute as part of the residency. I’m planning to Ustream the build so if you’re interested in watching Opel, Lee and myself build the bot tune in around 10am CST to check it out: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/3d-printing-at-aic