3D Printer

Some months ago I decided that I have to build my own 3D Printer. After some searching the decision was made to build the Prusa Mendel 3D Printer (search the web for a tremendous amount of information about that machine). Since this is my first contact with 3D Printers I started with buying a complete kit.

Here you see the result of the first few hours. Unfortunately I had a delivery delay in the so called "idler block" of the extruder which is missing in this image. Also the Z-Axis threaded rods are missing. A lot of time was spend to learn about the different variants of the machine and finding out which one I was actually building here. The kit contained "Wades extruder" for extrusion of the filament and also Arcols v4 hotend for heating it up and reducing its diameter using a nozzle. Arcols hotend is not assembled yet here because at that stage of development I didn't yet know that I have arcols hotend and thus did not have documentation about how to assemble it :)

Here you see Arcols v4 hotend prepared for applying fire cement and inserting the thermistor. Warning! I used TESA tape and it melted at higher temperatures. it even shut the 0,3mm nozzle hole which it should protect ;) Well. I used an acupuncture needle to reopen it.

Here the hotend is cemented. power was applied to the power resistor using a laboratory power supply. the yellow multimeter shows the resistance of the thermistor. the green multimeter has a thermoprobe attached. luckily it fits straight through the filament hole downto the tip of the nozzle. this way I was manually regulating temperature with the power supply until the fire cement was hard.

I worked a lot on the electronics, installing software and so on. now all steppers are running and the endstops are also working. the heat regulation of the hot-end is also running automatically now. You can also see the modified PC power supply which delivers 12V to the ramps 1.4 electronics.


the extruder and the hotend now work as an axis controlled by ramps 1.4, sprinter and pronterface. i'm really happy it works!	another photo


for the jigging process i cut two small smooth rods to the correct length. by the amount of bending i can precisly measure the distance.	Jigging done!


The bushings for the Y-axis have been glued and the glue will now dry for 24 hours.	The Y-Axis is driving! I'm impressed by the possible driving speed.


The machine looks almost done	Here I applied two fans for cooling the upper hot-end part. Without these fans I got regular hot-end jams and it took a while to figure that out. actually it was quite frustrating!

Oh well... Extrusion tests after extrusion tests...

Initial garbage. The problem was that the extruder jammed. In order to be able to regularly unmount the extruder wheel to clean the teeth i had to rotate my extruder 180 degrees. After cleaning the extruder it started to work quite well. The next problem was that the bottom layer didn't stick on the ground. After using blue masking tape cleaned with aceton it started to stick really good. Another point was that the nozzle must quite kiss the ground and not stay a millimeter or so above it. All has to be learned first :)


I was so proud of this rectangles and suddenly they popped of the ground...	Well. this should become a cube but actually it is just a flat piece of garbage.


Next day i decided to become megalomaniac. I downloaded that nice part from thingiverse and printed it. Believe me or not, it worked!	The part right after printing.


Here I am manually pushing the filament into the hot-end and watch the extrusion.	Nice result.


My very first successful cube extrusion and also the very first successful 3d print of my life!	What a beautiful cube.


The newest printed part. A pyramid from thingiverse. My daughter has chosen it to be printed.	Ready to bury the pharao.