Men Toys

Sometimes a man comes to the idea, that a new toy is needed. Wifes are difficult to change, so we need a piece of technic.
But which?

While talking between friends we find out that a 3D printer would be fascinating and owning one would be nice. But commercial ones are quite expensive (ones family needs food an a roof...) or some kind of ... tentative?

Both of us made some soldering and etching pcb's, but to build a whole printers electronic is to much efford. So this idea has to step aside.

But like many good ideas, this one also keep lingering around in the deep depths of our brains, jumping in front while reading something about new technologies. We saw 3D Printers in Catalogs, Websites, Faires ... everywhere.

So it came as it had to come: we started  project and want to build our own 3D Printer.

While looking around we found the Mendel90 from Nophead and our plans get more precise. This one should it be. First impression: stable and easy to build than many other Reprap-Models (Prusa and co - threaded rods are nice, but to get straight angles is challenging). And because it uses sawn parts from the hardware store, everything should be perpendicular.

But not a normal one. We don't want to build a standard 20 x 20 x 20 cm (about 12 x 12 x 12 inches) printing range, bigger is better. So we let it caculate 30 x 30 x 30 cm. The Mendel90 is completly scripted (in OpenSCAD), so to change its size you only need to change some lines in a configuration file. An other material? other smooth rods? other steppers? Just edit the config, start a Python Script and there it is, your customized Mendel90. The printed parts are adapted, the building plans and the bill of material would be generated accordingly.

What followed was a nice evening with good mexican food (and wifi) where the first orders were made. It's amazing how many parts are needed to build such a printer. So we ordered bearings, steel (smooth rods), stepper motors and many other parts - coming from many countries in europe. We didn't want to order in china because of the customs.

And we orders everything twice. Because none of us want to share this printer and we both need one.

Next problem was to get the plastic printed parts. We don't own a printer yet, so we can't print them ourself. So we got a kind of hen-egg problem. The solution was the FabLab in Hamburg. There they got two 3D printers, which we can use. Thursday evening is open Lab-Day, so we went there to take a look.

A big Stratasys and a Prusa Mendel and some kind of disillusion. The Stratasys is too slow to print all our things (twice), the Mendel was not calibrated and some other minor things to be done to get it working. But nothing which can't be done.

So the next thursday we were there again, loaded with a lot of tools. We started to calibrate te Mendel, first test prints doesn't look bad and made lust or more ...

Unfortunately there is only on thursdays the possibility to work on the printer and because it must be moved and stored every time after use (the FabLab shares its space with others), everytime we want to use it, a new calibration was necessary. Our hope to get the parts printed fast was vanishing.

In desperation we were looking for alternatives and found one. We buy one set of plastic on ebay, so we get one printer working. Then this one will print the parts for the second one. First self replicating printers, next step von Neumann probes.