Just Another RepRap

Here’s a bit more progress that I made today. I finally got around to cutting the bed, circuit board holder, and other pieces out of MDF (medium density fibreboard).

I don’t have easy access to a plotter, so I needed to print the dxf file for the thick sheet template out on multiple pages and arrange them together correctly. I thought it would be easy to find software that did this, but I didn’t find anything easily at first. Eventually I found some shareware package for windows called CADViewX Lite, which had a demo called CAD Open in Word that let me open a dxf file and print it across multiple pages (with hash lines). It didn’t work as nicely as I’d have liked, but with a few measurements and careful alignments I was able to lay out the pages on the MDF and tape them down with single and double sided tape:

The MDF sheet I had was an unwieldy 2′ x 4′, so first I cut off the relevant area:

Many cuts with the jigsaw later, I’d cut out the five pieces (scotch taping the template down again to the newly cut sides as I went). I’ll drill the holes and jigsaw out the internal ovals later.

Here’s the bed that the Mendel will print on:

I also was cutting rod today. Here are the fully completed smooth rod pieces, which make up the X, Y, and Z axes:

Those were cut out of 3 original rods. In addition to the 3 original smooth rods, there are 9 threaded rods that need to be cut into many pieces. I was able to get through one of those today, resulting in 3 threaded rod pieces:

Unfortunately the cutting drains the rechargable battery on my Dremel like crazy. I went to the store looking for a spare rechargable battery (quite naively) and of course no one carries them locally. I considered buying a 2nd Dremel that was corded, but even if I can only cut 1-2 rods every 3 hours, I’ll still get them all done pretty quickly, so it didn’t seem worth it. (I may just do more cutting with a hack saw, but it’s a pain). I did order a spare battery online – it’ll probably arrive by the time my Mendel is fully completed. 🙂

Oh, one more off-topic thing.. Last week when I ordered some red and black wire for the power connections from sparkfun.com, I saw they had some stepper motors that looked to both be NEMA 17 and have more holding torque than the ones I’d purchased from makerbot.com (at least that’s what I thought after a quick calculation.. I might be wrong). We’ll see when they arrive – they were cheap enough that it won’t break me if I bought four extra steppers for nothing – I’ll find a home for them.

Next up – a lot more cutting of threaded rod, drilling holes in the MDF, more assembly of the X carriage, and a bunch of electronics work to redo the boards I have for Mendel.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 7th, 2010 at 8:29 pm and is filed under MyRepRap. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.