iwant3d: March 2014

Our Prusa Mendel I3 machining and building process

I’m not going to go through the entire build process but here are some photos and notes on various parts of the build.

All machining was done Mark's mill and lathe.

Here is a test print bed bracket made out of wood, it has mounting points to bolt straight onto four 8mm pillow blocks.

Once the jig for the mill was tested and proven to work we made it out of aluminium.

These are the mounting blocks/ corners for the y axis frame.

They have 10mm holes for M10 stainless threaded bars and 8mm holes for the 8mm stainless round rails.

Y axis assembled

Brass trap nut being turned down on the lathe to fit an SK16 rail shaft guide as it was originally 20mm...I think.

One side of the Z and X assembly

8x1.5mm trap screws and brass nuts much less play and friction than standard threaded bars and nuts.

Test rig for Z axis

X axis brackets

Printhead assembly

In the end the main body of this was made out of three separate bits.

Print bed

This has been changed since but that's something for another day.

And as you already know here is the finished product...ish.

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.