First thing we managed to do was draft together a rough master plan where we throw together all of the work that has to be done, and any other organizational things involved with the project. Feel free to use it as a template for your own 3D printer project. The numbers don't match with chronological order (we'll probably be doing bits of part 1 while doing part 3 for example) so it's more of a list then a plan. Oh well.
The second thing we managed to do was get our hands on a "learning model" Makerbot 3D printer. After some ruffling through the reprap forums while mumbling over our idea, we stumbled across a post by Dr. William Turkel of the University of Western Ontario (http://history.uwo.ca/faculty/turkel/), who kindly allowed us to borrow one of his makerbots to learn from and possibly build mendel parts (if we needed). Here are some of the photos from the trip up to UWO to pick up the makerbot (it took us 7 hours to carefully assemble and test the partially built machine):
-the extruder parts strewn about a table, waiting to be assembled
a closeup of the Makerbot's extruder nozzle
-me making sure the circuitboards are firmly attached to the side
it extrudes! that Perl programming book though is not mine (I don't know how to program in Perl. Yet).
-us printing out our first object back in our university rez. We had to spend a few hours fixing the wacky thermistor and learning about the quirks of operating the machine (We didn't stumble across this helpful blog post until AFTER we did our first print T.T : http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/ten-tips-for-getting-your)
Big big big thank yous to Dr. Turkel for lending us the Makerbot, and his Phd. student Devon Elliot for helping us with the assembly and testing.
So that's our progress so far. In the next post, I'll share the results of our research process (one of the first items in the master plan) into existing DIY 3D printers.
Until next time,
Eric Yam
-WatRapter team Co-Lead
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