Saturday, April 18, 2009

RepStrap: a happy Y axis...

I realized on close examination of my first print that the coupling was off a bit in the Y dimension. After a bit of troubleshooting I found that the X belt was too tight, causing too much friction for the Y axis and slippage. I fixed it and printed another coupling. I also went ahead and printed a Darwin PCB clamp. I am very happy with the resolution. The motor coupling took 70 minutes. The PCB clamp took 30 minutes.



Wednesday, April 15, 2009

RepStrap: my first successful print...

I finally got my shipment of ABS plastic in. I was at my wits end with HDPE! No success at all. To put weeks worth of work simply... HDPE was too soft for me to use a pinch wheel extruder and I just couldn't get the drive screw extruder right. Once I am a pro at printing things I plan on printing nophead's solution. ABS worked the first time with my pinch wheel extruder... or the second time, rather. I spent most of the night trying to figure out why the RepRap host software kept crashing. It turns out that with a system with only 512MB of RAM the visual aid runs out of memory and crashes the host. To get around this I generate the GCode and send it to a file. Then I read in the GCode file instead of the 3D STL model. Tonight I had my first successful print! I printed a Z axis motor coupling since my electrical tape solution keeps failing me. I really like that I am able to better my machine on my first print!

Here are some pictures while printing.




Here is the final product cleaned up a bit.



Here is a screen capture of the 3D object I printed. As you can see, I got what I asked for.



Of course, I had to video such a momentous occasion! Unfortunately, there is no sound. You will have to take my word for it that it is very quiet!


My first successful print... from gavilan on Vimeo.