Playing Ketchup

It's been two weeks since I've posted here, but these past few weeks have been quite hectic! I've essentially gone underground, my friends and roommates have had to call to make sure I was still alive. What have I been doing you ask? Well, since my last post, we've had two extremely productive weekends at Metrix Create:Space,and thanks to all the people at the Saturday night Makerbot madness event's, we've finally got frank tuned in and printing ABS quite well. In Darivanh's post, she talked about all the settings that we've changed on Frank to get him printing properly. The ABS parts were coming out great, but then I discovered PLA. My order of PLA, from Makergear arrived on Monday and I never wanted to print ABS again. Before I get into the awesomeness of PLA, let me explain why I ordered it, I'm making a reprap mendel, which is also the reason I've gone underground for the past week. I've been essentially printing nonstop for the past 7 day's, and I've almost today I've finished printing all the parts, all the electronics and steppers have arrived, and my hardware will be here by the end of this week. So in theory, by the time my next post goes up, I'll have a fully assembled reprap mendel. Here's a late night picture of Frank printing.

Oh yeah we added some green LED's too!

Anyway, when I first started printing PLA I was terrified, since Frank was having difficulty printing ABS(blowing up PTFE heat barrier's left and right), I could only imagine the the onslaught of damage the, more difficult to print, PLA was going to bring. Before I began down this treacherous road, I implemented Matthew's tips, from Darivanh's post, and he also donated a very handy mod for the Makerbot(see below picture).



If you look at the PTFE heat barrier, you'll see a regular 1/2" copper tube coupler, that's has a slit cut down lengthwise, then held tight by a hose clamp. Ever since I've done this mod...well I haven't blown up a heat barrier since.

So as I wait for my reprap hardware to arrive, I've been reviewing my past week, I realized that I could almost quantify an entire week of my life in a physical manner. Essentially every second of down time I had was devoted to printing my reprap, The below picture represents just over 80 hours of my life last week, combine that with roughly 24 credits of school, and you have one extremely busy week!


I didn't include all the electronics, nor did I include all the steppers, but I'm essentially using the Makerbot electronics, with Lin Engineering steppers for my projects. Hopefully I'll have time this coming weekend to put everything together and I'll soon have a working reprap, you'll be hearing from me soon when it's all done!