iwant3d

Hi All!
This is my first blog post...EVER!
I've been 3d printing for nearly a year now, I got my first printer in April 2013 as a birthday present to myself, It was the SUMPOD basic... there were a few problems and limitations with it, I made my own modifications and it was a good start and I made some pretty cool things. :)

Tablet stand

Experimental RC car wheel...never used

connected an LED strip to the printer

geared extruder added

After a month or so I showed a good friend and engineer how it worked and what it was capable of, at this point we decided we could do better :) and decided to start designing our own, we chose the Prusa Mendel i3 as a starting point and went from there.

The entire design and build process took about 3 month, we used as many standard CNC parts as possible and came up with this.

Really messy I know, but this was still work in progress. It's very sturdy and all mechanical components were as good as we could justify, things like the trap screw nuts being made of brass, all the belts and pulleys being high quality anti backlash, all parts that would normally be 3d printed were machined in aluminium, including the extruder assembly. We also decided to buy E3D V5 hotends, (In my opinion one of the best hotends available).

This is the basic setup I've been using since September now, I'm constantly tweaking and modifying things but it's basically the same. Since this photo was taken I've added a water cooled dual extruder (still only using one at the moment though), added my own geared bowden extruder that uses bevel gears (available to download here: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:239085).

Replaced the heated bed for a 240V silicone mat and anodised aluminium sheet and made a base to enclose all the electronics and water reservoir.

These are all upgrades I plan on blogging.

Here are some pictures of projects I've worked or am working on.