Reprap Prusa i2
All remaining parts arrived. Hot end fitted
Today saw the motherlode of parts arrive! The morning’s post brought the J-Head hot end, power supply and a couple of Atmel microprocessors; afternoon brought Fedex and my stepper motors! With the exception of a handful of connectors, that should now be everything I need to finish building my RepRap. Here are some photos of the parts:
Needless to say, I couldn’t wait to get out to the workshop after work! I fitted the motors, pulleys and tightened the belts and then spent the rest of the evening fitting the hot end. The extruder body needed a little cleaning up to accommodate the hot end and I fabricated an adaptor plate which slips into the groove on the hot end to hold it in place. I measured everything up and worked out roughly what I needed then opened Inkscape and drew an accurate version. I was hoping I’d be able to find an off-cut of 5mm plywood somewhere in the garage but, sadly, came up empty. I ended up using the same 6mm MDF as I used to make the print beds. MDF isn’t the best material to drill as it tends to fray and fluff up due to its fibrous nature, but it cut better than I’d hoped for on the band saw and cleaned up reasonably well afterwards using a scalpel and sand paper. Here’s a photo of the finished adaptor:
Note the 1mm deep channel I had to cut out to reduce the thickness to the 5mm needed to fit in the hot end’s groove. The printout underneath is a whole sheet of the templates - you know, just in case I messed a few up ;) Turns out, I got it right first time! I used double-sided tape to stick the template to the MDF which worked really well for both cutting and drilling. The finished part fits perfectly, as you can see in the following two photos:
All that’s left to do now is to assemble the hot end electronics, finish wiring everything up, test the PCB, program the Atmel and then do the final calibration. I’m hoping to produce some movement from it over the weekend, although I doubt I’ll get as far as printing a test piece yet, but keep an eye on this blog to see what happens!
Posted on 02 November 2012
