Thread: anyone built a 3d printer

My BIL is part of a club that built one. The RepRap is then capable of printing most of the parts to recreate itself, and BIL was going to get a set for himself. I saw it in the early days, and there were still some obvious teething troubles (you should have seen one of the "gears" it produced, very entertaining). It looks like fun technology though.

Hi Gaza,

I built a Maker-bot, my son bought the kit. Maybe 2 years ago, I think.

General thoughts, in no particular order...

We burnt out the extruder head once, but it was an easy fix, we found that it was better to download the g-code completely to the machine then run it, rather than download over the comms while running, slight pauses were leading to inconsistency in laying down layers.

Getting the raft layer down and having it stable was always a problem, you'd be almost finished and the whole thing would move a little...

Multiple extruder heads and the extra flexibility of a support layer is handy if you are doing re-entrant shapes.

The plywood and toothed belt construction was surprisingly strong...

It's worthwhile to set up a feed system of some sort, so that it doesn't get tangled or feed inconsistently.

Great fun to play with, and a fantastic learning tool..

I'd be tempted to fit an extruder head on a standard cnc router and see how it goes..

Regards
Ray

i was looking at a head to mount on my CNC ,
https://www.woodworkforums.com/f170/3...ad-cnc-150204/

they still seem to be out of stock , i have a 4th axis stepper driver for the feed control , figured it would be as simple as a 12 volt heat wire and a 4th axis connection at the spindle

the model i was looking at ( head only )for $200
StepStruder® MK7 Complete Kit - MakerBot Industries

Hi Sawdustsniffer,

That extruder head looks like it's miles ahead of what they used previously, but I don't think it comes with temperature control. That would be something you'd have to add seperately, I notice they are using a type K thermocouple, the one we had used a thermistor.

One problem I recall with the earlier maker-bot extruder heads was if you left it on the plastic would burn inside the extruder nozzle and you'd have to clean it out with bit of wire.

You could program that into the cnc control, to switch off the extruder heating element when a part was finished. ( a bit like spindle control I guess )

Regards
Ray

cheers for the feedback,

does not sound that crazy after all,

still looking around for actual total material cost

There's a time lapse build of one of these on a local electronics blog.

EEVblog #246 - Makerbot Thing-O-Matic Time Lapse Build | EEVblog - The Electronics Engineering Video Blog

and another one of getting it to work

EEVblog #257 - Makerbot Troubleshooting | EEVblog - The Electronics Engineering Video Blog

I would ask what you want it for? I had thought about one for a bit of fun and then later on thought about one for a more serious reason.

Just recently I thought about it again and got to see one. The quality of the work was not encouraging. If it was good I would have used it for making some small custom knobs for aircraft panels.

It wasn't up to the task though. I would say if you want a fun project and make a few cool knick knacks with it and you think it would interest you then why not. I dont think it's a hard build.

If you want it to create something specific then research the quality of the output before you spend too much.