We have reached another milestone in our RepRap Projekt. Our RepStrap finished printing its first child. The Prusa Mendel v2 is assembled and working.
Last two challenges had to be overcome: Because the RepStrap still has no heated printbed the Prusa x-carriage had to be made from PLA. Which is not the best choice when faced by the heat radiation from a heatbed at up to 110°C and extruder temperatures beyond 200°C. Fortunately the carriage survived just long enough to get its ABS-replacement printed on the Prusa itself.
The same applies for the Extruder body: The PLA version did not withstand the heat long enough so we temporarily replaced it with the RepStrap’s extruder. This way we could print an ABS-extruder (seen in the picture below; there are still some warping-issues since the power supply was not capable of heating the printbed up to our desired temperature)
During the assembly of the Prusa, we decided to substitute some of the parts with better replacements than provided by the original Prusa repository. These are:
- MakerGear-Prusa-Mendel ball-bearing support for z-axis lead screw
(lower-z-bar-clamp-left.stl, lower-z-bar-clamp-right.stl) - Lm8uu X Carriage with Fan Mount for Prusa Mendel by tommyc
- Accessible Wade’s Extruder 9/47 by Stoffel15
Tagged: Open Hardware, Open Source, RepRap