I may get around to documenting this printer further, however much has been already written on the Internet about the Prusa Mendel i2 Printer so I will focus on how I changed the original design. Extruder For the extruder, I have done away with the traditional gearing system and put a hobbed pulley directly onto the shaft of a NEMA17 stepper motor. A spring loaded system presses a 308ZZ bearing against the filament and provides pressure...

I have migrated my previous reprap.briancantin.com posts over to my new novakane.ca domain (you’re already there). This new blog will have all sorts of hacks, articles and general technology projects that I work on, most being open source. Coming up soon will be posts of some of my 3D object designs and some guitar related electronics projects.

I decided to try out the new spiral vase mode in Slic3r. What this does is print an object in a continuous extrusion, rather than the normal stop, raise to next layer, then continue like usual. The idea is to create a seamless print that is in theory water-tight. Something glitched on my printer part way through… I’m not sure what happened. The end result is that the glitch slowly worked its way around the vase as it printed....

It is well established that all micro electronics work by containing an active loop of magic smoke. As long as the magic smoke is contained within the circuit everything works well. However, many things can conspire to break this wonderful system. You will know when this happens, because you will observe the magic smoke leaking out of your device. In all seriousness, a bad crimp on a heavy gauge wire going to the heated bed platform...

I posted the other day the lastet build description of my Prusa Mendel i2. I used that build to print a new set of parts that were printed with a focus on part strength and solidness as opposed to economy of printing. After I had a full set of parts ready, it was time to tear it all down and rebuild it. Here is a picture of the basic framework assembled: Note there are some changes from previous build and a stock i2 build: I removed the...

    After my latest refinement of my 3D printer, I found I was starting to get some really decent prints. Yesterday I received some very nice 1.75mm PLA from Revolution Printers, and decided to try it out. This filament prints very evenly at 200C, and produces a very nice glossy surface. These two “Teethy Tiki” models from cereberus333 are straight off the print bed, printed with a 0.4mm nozzle at a 0.25mm layer...