[3DP] Rostock printer

I've mentioned several times that I've been gearing up to build a second 3D printer, the Rostock. It's more capable in many ways than my Mendel: Prints more than twice as fast with no loss of precision, greatly enlarged print volume (8" x 8" x 20-24"), and cheaper in that I can make more parts at home vice ordering them. Any parts that I don't already have, I have asked for on my Christmas lists. I hate doing them, but the normal people in my life ask for lists. And so they get them, with web links, very specific part numbers and options to choose, because I am a Full-Spectrum Maker and Power Nerd, and those parts will make me at least as happy as normal presents would make normal people
*description section below shamelessly cribbed from build session thread
Today in the shop, Rostock went 3-D. That is to say, I cut out the plywood top and bottom pieces, connected appropriate printed parts, and connected the top and bottom with 36" tall 8mm tool steel rods. You can see it below. There's a lot of background clutter, but it's not hard to see...

And up close on the base, you can see the M4 screws holding the printed parts to the base. The cutouts in between the rods are where the carriage drive belts go from the motor pulley on the bottom up to the idler pulley on top. The carriages are connected to the belt somewhere in between.

And speaking of the carriages... The three carriages ride up and down on pairs of linear bearings. You can also see a closer view of the uper end printed parts that hold the 8mm rods, and soon, the idler pulleys. I don't have the M3 screws in the carriages yet because they get ordered later this week. between the carriages and the platform (the thing in the middle that holds the hot end) will be 3 pairs of 3/8" arrow shafts with Traxxas universal joints on the ends. Need to source the arrow shafts, already have the unis in hand
Yes, I know I need to put some cheap particle board up to cover the insulation overhead.

If you have within you an inner Maker, get out and MAKE!

 

After the test and calibration prints, it'll be USS Connecticut BB-18 in two parts

 

Off to the left, with a blowtorch leaning on it is a Suffren hull (grey gel coat). On the tablesaw (what the Rostock is sitting on (very flat surface)) is a Golo, a T-103, and Evstafi. And a bunch of other crap. Cleaning weekend is in 2 weeks with the 2 local young men Christopher and Stefan coming over with Brian K to straighten things out. Once I get Malaya done, I want to get some hulls finished and out of there. Coming close to dying made me think about all the unfinished boats that I was leaving that would probably get destroyed. Okay, I thought about a lot of things, but that was one Got to get the unfinished hull population down!

Please spay or neuter your boat! lol

 

Are you volunteering to come help, Herr Bitondo? I'm sure we can find something to your liking...

 

I might... Just model the deck separate from the hull, but with the caprail modelled as part of the subdeck, with about 1mm of tolerance between the deck and caprail on wither side, and 0.6mm thickness tolerance on the edges of the deck. And then send it as a sketchup file like you did with that special project you did

 

Post-Christmas update: the hot end is here and it's glorious! The electronics are still in shipping, but they'll be here soon. Almost going to have another printer! And then I can start on the third... which is more for you guys than it is for me. Kotori came to a build session and got the classified briefing and thinks it's great. Or I looked dangerously crazy and he said so to humor the madman. Your choice

 

Once the 3rd printer has a successful test (probably in the fall sometime), I will be posting the files and instructions for building one someplace where everyone can get at them. Probably via Reprap.org and github. And here, obviously Without giving it away, the idea is to reduce the cost of entry to under $300, hopefully under $250, with a decent print volume. Enough to do anything you're likely to need, whther for boats or around the house. Print volume likely to be around 6.5" in diameter, about 12" tall, able to print in PLA and nylon. Eventually a heated bed will be added to the possibilities, allowing ABS to be printed, too, but basic functions will be first. The unnamed printer is one of the reasons that I am slowing boat building after I finish Malaya. But it'll be open-source, and doable with metric or SAE hardware.

In Rostock news, I got the hotend for Christmas! It's the E3D hotend that is a single piece of Stainless steel, so no worries about hitting Teflon's heat limit when printing Nylon! I'll be running it using Ultimaker's Cura slicing program, running it independent of a PC using SD cards for transferring the files. This is the most reliable way to do it, every time that my laptop gets a winlogin error, it drops the &^*#^&% print job. In the middle. So no more running it from the PC if I can help it. Bonus is that I can do the slicing on my gaming rig and not the little weak netbook, so the slicing will be done in seconds vice 5 minutes.

 

Congrats on embracing the future

I love the E3D hotend. I have mine on the desk and it's getting assembled this weekend. Get the one that goes with a bowden tube and 1.75mm filament.

RAMPS 1.4 mainly because 1) I'm familiar with it and 2) the guy who created the Rostock wrote the code to run on the RAMPS 1.4 electronics, and since that code is what translates the GCODE into motion of the motors and does the trigonometry (since a delta bot's motion is different from a cartesian bot's motion for the same end result). Run on sentence. Sorry

When I get home, I will email you the address that I found a good cheap setup that has an LCD screen for controlling the printer without a PC. Also a good cheap source for the heated bed with borosilicate glass.

 

It is addicting, be forewarned.

 

Got a little done yesterday. The control electronics arrived, still waiting on one more electronics package with the motor drivers. At the build session yesterday, Gascan found the package of M8 nuts and bolts that I was looking for, and I managed to get the upper end idlers and belt guides installed, and we slid the timing belt on to see how it looked. It looks GOOD. I need to get the belts on and tight so that I will be ready to connect the motor drivers and start moving things. Also need to make the jig to hold the arms from the carriages to the print head (6 of them).