Just Another RepRap

Huge milestone.. My entire X axis is assembled! (I’ve held rods alongside pieces many times when showing this to friends, trying to describe how in will work, and now I can just show you.

I’ll cut to the chase and show the final pictures first. Here is my mostly completed X axis assembly:

I still need to put on the belt, PTFE, and heater barrel. Six of the nuts on the carriage are still temporary regular nuts, whereas all of the others that are supposed to be nylock are now nylock.

Here are some of the pics leading up to that completed X axis.. (sorry that there aren’t more captions or descriptions – I’m trying to spend more time building than blogging.. 🙂 )

FIrst, here are pictures of the Vert Bearing 360 assembly:

I really like this next pic:

Ok, so when I ordered parts, the “mudguard washers” I originally obtained were way too small. The whole point was that they were supposed to extend out far to hold up a timing belt. I finally found a source (not McMaster) that had mudguard washers (fender washers) of the right size. These next two pics show the new washers and them in their correct place.

Ok. So next, there are pulleys that need to go on the stepper motor shafts, the insides of which have oval/rectangular holes intended for filed-down stepper motor shafts. (There are now some good alternatives on thingiverse that don’t require as much filing, but I’m not in a position where I can print new parts right now). So, I filed down the shaft on one of the stepper motors (and I’ll do the same for the next two soon). Here I clamped the shaft in a vise, after caking the base of the shaft in blue-tack, which is something like silly putty, to keep steel filings from being pulled directly into the stepper motor (it’s a big magnet, remember?).

Then, a few Dremmel cuts later and after lightly tapping with a plastic mallet (with the base of the stepper shaft supported by a clamped small hex socket), I managed to get the pulley on the shaft!

Here’s a ridiculously short 5-second video showing that:

So then I moved onto the motor bracket. Unfortunately I think I tightened one side of a clamp too much (on the rest of them I carefully went one side to the other), resulting in a crack in this piece (visible in this picture). Hopefully it doesn’t make that much of a difference in the end:

So I continued.. Here is the bottom of the motor bracket, with one of the two x-axis rods in place:

Then the top and bottom once the second rod was placed:

Here are two cylindrical spacer pieces that go next along the rods:

Next on the x axis rods, I placed the Vert Bearing 360 assembly shown earlier in this post:

Here’s another crack that doesn’t seem like it will be a problem:

And finally, here are the first two pictures of the assembled X axis again, along with other closeups. Sorry about the horrible lighting – I should take some of these outside or something.

Can’t wait until I get some free time to move onto the next steps. I might not get free time until Monday night though.

Getting closer!

p.s. I’m thinking that maybe I need to replace those thin sheets with pieces of tin or something – I hope not.

Man, some of you are pretty gullible! 😀

Congratulations to everyone who recognized yesterday’s blog post for what it was (given the date of the post).

I’d closed off comments before posting so that I’d catch them all in a moderator trap so no one spoiled it too early.
(I’m going to release them now.. the prior post is here, and the now-approved comments are here).

For those of you who don’t know me personally, I suppose I can understand you falling for it, although I thought the bit about melting the 106 pieces that I spent months printing into a “melted sculpture of failure” was enough of a giveaway (as was the specific date calculation hint).. Sorry to all of you who thought there were parts to scavenge.

As to the roughly 50% of you that do know me that also believed it, whoa! (extends hand for handshake).. Jeff Keegan.. Nice to meet you.. Hello? All I’ve talked about for 6+ months was RepRap! I think I talk about RepRap more than I talk about Lost!! Thanks for believing I’d quit! LOL

If so many of you weren’t so concerned, I’d have omitted this post and let you all figure it out on your own.. I like my humor nice and dry. But especially with there being so many people on the rss aggregate feeds reading this that don’t know me and my personality, I suppose I owe you the smiley face at the end.

Here’s my illustrative comment: I’d probably stop using my TiVos before I quit my RepRap project.

..and for those who don’t understand THAT, my name is Jeff Keegan – look here, here and here:

🙂

Always check the date of articles that you read in the spring, lest you be fooled.

..Jeff

p.s. Somehow, I even managed to fool my wife, who couldn’t believe what she was hearing. I practically bit through my tongue on the phone trying to keep from laughing. So the rest of you, don’t feel too bad, but still.. 🙂

p.p.s. Progress is coming along nicely!

Well, at long last I’ve decided to give up on building my Mendel. It’s been several months, and all I have to show for it is some hunks of plastic, a bunch of metal rods, and lots of circuit boards.

I think the main thing that pushed me over the edge was the many times that I’ve described RepRap to people, and they ask “so what are you going to build with it?”. I have trouble justifying building such an expensive machine just to make my own coat hook, which although it would be mine, I could have bought for a few dollars at Walmart.

I’ve spent so much time building this thing. What a waste.

I’m not even interested in mailing out the Mendel parts I’ve made, because I don’t want anyone else to follow in my footsteps and waste months of their lives. I think I’ll build a big pile of them, light a fire, and melt them all into one cool melted sculpture of failure.

Here endeth my journey. I started around 10/20/2009, so by today’s date that makes it 5 months and 10 days that I wasted on this unimaginative dull project. Sigh.

..Jeff Keegan, disallusioned.

[Edit: Gotcha! Man, some of you are pretty gullible (and/or don’t own calendars). 😀

See the next post for a followup.

I’d blocked comments yesterday so no one would spoil it too early. I’m now passing those comments through, after this one (I’m not sure if WordPress will put those before or after this). ]