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.
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.
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