So the oddysey begins! I'm extruding plastic and roughly onto the heatbed so I guess you could say I'm up and printing! Woohoo! Time for a whisky indeed - well I'm one step ahead of you and I've had one already, not out of this one though, the holes are too big and I don't like wasting whisky.

The way you see 3D-printing portrayed in the media these days you'd think it was a mature technology - in a sense it is - its been around since the 80s and people like Stratasys and 3DSystems are perfecting some very expensive printers and some very interesting techniques. They're the guys printing hip joints out of titanium and carbon parts for jet fighters and so on. Us home hobbyists aren't quite hot on their heels just yet.

We are however the first generation of home printers, the early adopters willing (sometimes masochistically so) to go through the trials and tribulations of the machines constantly breaking down on us, malfunctioning, needing replacement parts and so on and so on. The frustration that is overcome simply by a zen like insistence upon carrying on and trying again and again.

Luckily we have each other though and there's always another enthusiast not too far away and willing to help. I was able to print this new X-axis slider in Europe's first 3D printing cafe, Dimension Alley, not far away in Prenzlauer Berg. I like the look of the black PLA and having been printed on their Replicator 2 its very good quality.

I've been getting some wobble on the x-axis and thought I'd filed the square hole for the aluminium a bit too big and loose - there's a delicate balance to be struck when trying to get it to slide nice and smoothly and easily but without wobble so it doesn't warp the print when it changes direction.

Then I realised what these holes are for, if I screw a couple of screws into them I can grip the aluminium as much or as little as I like. Only trouble is, the heads of the screws get in the way when I try and attach the hot end again.

                                         This should all be solvable by some headless screws for alan keys like these                                                     <-----------------------------------                                                    

 which I can get on Reichenberger Straße over the bridge in Kreuzberg. Or at least I hope I can, the last time I needed some screws, the screwshop there sufficed for my needs.

All this has been complicated however by the fact that my Bike is in the repair shop. It wouldn't need to be in the repair shop if the repair shop had repared it right first time. I understand the frustration though and I will give them my best zen look when I pick it up, either today or tomorrow. I still refuse to buy a train ticket when I have a perfectly good bike.



Check out the video's I've been uploading by the way, over at the top on the right hand side :D

Awesomely enough, the system of the Y-axis by which the heatbed travels horizontally back and forth is the same as for the Huxley so I've done it before, no venturing forth into unexplored territory.

 Neatness in electronics however is something I'm not accustomed to and not really something that comes naturally to me. I showed my Huxley to a guy who builds Prusa i3s in the Berlin Fablab and he was, how should I say this? A little bewildered perhaps - like, 'What does this guy think he's doing?' just by the state of my wiring. That was before I discovered the joys of cable ties.

I choose to pass time,

differently when my wires,

need fine attention.

The extruder is like that of the Huxley, which funnily enough, I have put together and taken apart about a hundred and one times, here it is with the thermistor (black heatshrink, and red and blue) and the heating element, rod thing - the big red one. The nozzle is the gold bit with the screw threads at the bottom. The black rotating thing with the blades on the right is the......oh you got it already? Fan, yeah, the fan. Very important. Especially if you want to build a reprap in Vietnam...

I got a new hair dryer as you can see. Its probably a bit hot for hair as you may have guessed. But its perfect for making your electronics neater and safer using heatshrink tubing. It shrinks when you heat it up - the clue is in the name.

Before

After

 If you can cast your  mind back to my Huxley effort then you'll know neatness in electronics was not my strongest suit. More messy than it should have been for certain!

There she is looking small messy and ready to be resurrected

With my trusty soldering iron at the ready and the mechanical construction complete - easy with all those T-nuts, I am ready to start wiring. One other great aspect of the Foldarap is that the electronics fit comfortably in the base between the heatbed and the casing. This should make things look a lot neater.

And this is where all those wires have to go. This is the minitronics board from reprapworld.com and is designed to be pretty much plug and play - I just have to wire everything in correctly first. 

Wish me luck!

Here's what I made today

To stop the kids rolling out of the bed. On the day Scotland decided it doesn't want to be a nation, me and my Mum's Hubby made a fence to stop the little ones rolling to injury in their sleep, making a bad night for us all. Perhaps the Ordnungsamt will come a knockin' to make sure its solid enough to support children. Then we had a 12 year old Glen Fiddich and speculated whether it'd be that long before the next time, or whether it really was a neverendum.

The 15 year old awaits us after our dinner of Shepherd's pie and I'll carry on seeing if I can get the printer to print. I've been busy, busy indeed. If you thought that change was going to take as long as good whisky does then think again. Let's see how I feel after the 18 year old anyway. See you on the other side.

Here's my handle, there's my spout,

 load me down and print me out :D

Check it out, the Foldarap can print its own handle, or a second handle - on the list - and I think its a good symbol. Not just because I can lug it around and print at someone's house, or on the train, but because home manufacturing changes the amount of lugging around that needs to be done. None of us have felt its full impact yet but the coming economy 3.0 will begin changing our lives soon - and I'm not talking about entrepeneurs taking over the advertising channels and selling us plastic schnick-schnack ticky tack.

Its interesting to think about how the homunculi are "leading the way" at the moment from the armchairs of their industry roots. Stratasys and 3Dsystems only contribution to the consumer market at the moment seems to be making sure all of us can pay wads of cash for more realistic smaller versions of ourselves and there are whole multi-million dollar companies offering only this one service. A Mini-me to me symbolises what our revolution is not.

I see an aristocratic Arabian finding a lamp and in the desert and he asks the Djinn that pops out if he can have a full colour statue to put in the garden. Where is the imagination? Sure its a logical thought but there is really so much more that a Djinn can do right?

The best thing about the Djinn, in contrast to money, is that whatever you wish for materialises before your eyes, no need to wait on delivery. Its of course debatable that there are other "best things" about a Djinn than this, like his ability to alter time and space to suit your desires, ("Hold on, gimme that same statue but make it 3 billion years ago and on Mars" but this one is up there.)

The best thing about home manufacture is that you only need to send the information around the world, not the product. 

Catastrophic climate change or just economic castration for quite a lot of shipping and trucking concerns? I think I'll take the latter, the social implications of the former being slightly more extreme. Ahem.

The parts are all designed to allow aluminium extrusions to slide in. Yeah, they call them extrusions.

All of the mechanicals are put together using the same ingenious technique, Voila:

An Allen key is the only tool you need

Fingers are enough to screw the T nut in

Slide it into the slot on the extrusion

As you tighten the T nut rotates...

and grips :D

As seen here.

Using the holes you can attach the whole thing this way.

Here's how the folding works, you just have to loosen two of those T nuts and the Z-axis will fold into the same dimension at the rest of the frame:

As you can see I've attached 3 motors already

That 98% Ethannol is just for cleaning by the way.

So after moving house and becoming a father for the second time, I'm just about getting the DIY out of the way and have started to build another Reprap. Having burnt out the control board on my Huxley, all part of the early adopter learning curve, I bought a kit to build a Foldarap. As you may have guessed, its a Reprap that you can fold up. This was the moment I opened the box:

Designed by Emmanuel Gilloz (#Foldarap, openedge.eu) and shipped in from France, the kit reeks of aesthetic consideration. Colour coded RP parts and everything screwing easily onto the aluminium frame makes the construction of the mechanical parts a pleasure. The record for putting one together with friends is 4 hours would you believe :O

I do very much like the idea of cycling from client to client along the winding lanes in France, or here in Berlin, carrycase in hand printing something special for someone not too far away, then folding together again, off to the next damsel in distress in need of a plastic part. Maybe my Foldarap has turned me into too much of a romantic, maybe I was too much of a romantic all along.

Grab those tools and start making something or I'll shoot!

Moving into a new house of course means finding a new corner to tinker in and here's what it looks like now that I've "pimped" my space!









Its really theraputic and soul enriching putting together something like this, and setting up has none of the frustration that fiddly electronics has. All that goes through your head is the romance and the sugarcoated glowing vision of how productive you're gonna be. Oh joy!

Now for the actual work to start. And this time it's serious, my contract ran out at work and in effect I'm now a full time maker. Gulp, here goes nothing!

 

Unpacked and unassembled

 Here are all the reprapped parts, they look quite good huh? The orange is Y-axis, blue Z-axis and extruder, grey X-axis, couldn't be simpler...or could it?