toolbox printer: boca bearings edition

Chad completed his Boca Bearings Toolbox/3D printer recently. I believe he is building a copy of this for himself since this one will be going to Boca. This one is very slick with a neat welded steel frame. I think he could produce printer kits with his welded frame if was inclined to do so. This frame takes the DIY printer out of "hacker/hack" territory and into a place where the welded frame as been thought out and designed to optimize production. Chad has been getting a lot of opportunities to build machines and do commissions for people. He also recently secured a teaching position. It's great to see how he has taken the ideas that he learned in the first Digital Fabrication course and his experiences in grad school and morphed them into what he is now doing. What a cool 3D printer too!

jim donnelly scans

Chad and I had a meeting with Jim Donnelly yesterday. I did some 3D scanning for him and we discussed things in the DCRL.

reamed casting

Chad asked me to help him ream the cast iron piece that he is using for his 3D printer drill press. We set it up on my Bridgeport and as usual it took longer to do the set-up than it did to actually ream the holes. The casting came out really nice. The Stratasys linear rail rods slipped right in once we were finished. It was cool to see this part go from cnc routed pink foam to completed iron part. I'll hopefully be able to post some pics of the drill press turned 3d printer soon.

3d printed lightsaber

I printed this copy of a lightsaber after I saw it on Ultimaker's new YouMagine site. It looks like Ultimaker is going to get into the same action that is happening on Thingiverse. You can get the files for the lightsaber here. I figured Noah would like the lightsaber and I was right. We put it together before barely getting all of the supports cleaned off. We may have to do an aluminum casting of this just for fun in the near future.

prusa i3

I'm finally feeling better. I'm not sure exactly sure if I had pneumonia or just bronchitis, but whatever it was, it had me down and out for a week. I feel like I'm back on my feet now. I went to the doctor today for a check-up and all was well. I am wrapping up things on one of Shea's hands today, but thought I would upload some pics of some of the things I attempted to do while I was sick. The picture above is from a full plate of Prusa i3 parts that I printed at once on my Makerbot. I gave my nephew, Drew my old Prusa i3 so it's time for me to replace that particular model of machine. Figured I'd get started on the printed parts while I was laid up in bed. The Makerbot does a stellar job of printing large trays of parts. I always had big problems with printing large parts on my Rep Rap based machines so this is a welcome advantage to using the Makerbot.

printer to laser

Laser engraver/cutter retrofit for 3D printer. Files are on Thingiverse. More importantly, the video shoes all connections. 

Also, this one from here. Kit priced slightly over $200. They have an Inkscape "laser engraver" plugin that converts to gcode that I think might be good to grab regardless of getting the kit.

Turn your printer into a laser, but make sure to be safe!

new makerbot filaments

I'll need to get some of this...

ao-100

Little by little I've been working on putting Matt's  AO-100 3D printer together. So far so good. I printed all of the parts for it on the FDM2000. That makes life easy;set it and forget it.