During Fab6, the international fablab conference, the printerprinter has been presented during a session on ‘refab’ at the fablab Amersfoort. Results of the workshop, presentation slides etc. can be found on the wiki. The workshop resulted in a set of ‘house rules’ for refab in fablabs (but they equally apply to work in whatever labRead more
The printer-printer from the previous post was shown for the first time to the public at the Gogbot 2010 festival in Enschede. In a steel shipping container a small recycled-robotics lab was created featuring ‘pix’ – the pneumatic robot desk-light and a remote controlled power-socket-with-construction-light called the ‘Color Chaser’.Read more
With the StarLC10 matrix repstrap ending up as pizza plotter, a start has been made building a new 3D machine using only the parts of 3 HP deskjet 840c printers. The printers contain many useful parts, the casing is made almost entirely out of ABS (printing material, hurray!) Especially the sliders come in nice, rectangularRead more
After the promising results with the first nylon extruder, we (woutzweers and I) made a new nozzle following reprap extruder size (so a 3.5 mm feed hole and a 0.5 mm extrusion hole). The extruder head consist of a small piece of brass with two holes placed at 45degree angle. The soldering iron has beenRead more
Of course, the machine described in the previous post was never meant to have a sole purpose of pizza printing (which it admittedly does badly) but to become a repstrap machine so I can build a sweet Mendel. Next step after a cartesian robot is the plastic extruder. Although other people have tried to useRead more
Bringing personal fabrication to your kitchen: the pizza Plotter. During one of the last lectures I gave for Creative Technology about reprap‘s and personal fabrication one of the pizza hungry students (Symplexity) pointed out the necessary connection between pizza and production. Thus the idea for a Pizza Printer was born. The previous posts on theRead more
It is fun to see how deprivation of material can spark creativity! By setting the boundaries for this project to use ONLY the parts of printers and computer junk, you can – will come up with solutions you otherwise wouldn’t have thought of! After last week’s enthusiastic post, reality kicked in hard when trying toRead more
Some time ago I tried rep-strapping using 5-1/4” diskdrive motors and MDF wood. (see here). The motors turned out to be way too weak, the M5 thread way to slow. Perhaps a larger thread (M12) and some bigger steppermotors can save this evening of work. In this second attempt I have been using only theRead more
I’m really enthusiastic about the reprap project. The whole Idea of having a printer that can print functioning parts, just on your desktop is .. well.. cool. The reprap is a machine that can replicate part of its own parts. However, to build one from scratch you get a certain ‘bootstrap’ problem.. Hence you haveRead more