Last weekend, the ever-generous Rob very kindly printed out a whole batch of parts for my 3D printer:
With the ones he’s already done for me (and a few bearings, nuts and bolts and bit of carbon fibre rod) these comprise enough to build the printer completely, apart from the ‘hot end’. So that’s what I’ve done over the last few days. Although the parts were printed to quite high accuracy, with holes in the right places, there was still a fair bit of smoothing, trimming and tapping of holes to be done. I also had to drill one or two new holes where I had forgotten to design them in. This is version 1, after all. The assembled result looks like this:
It’s a bit of a monster. At least I’ll be able to print large things (think ‘traffic cone’) if I want to.
Here’s a close up of the print head. The bit in the middle is a holder for a pen, so I can do some tests for accuracy before I fit a hot extruder.
I’m sure you want to see it working. There is a video on YouTube, which shows it moving around at a variety of speeds. Now I need to get a printing platform in place, hack the Marlin firmware in the controller to support a delta configuration, and start doing some serious tests.