Having started my fascination with 3d printers back in 2011 when an associate showed me some youtube vid's, I was completely mesmerized by how cool they were. Then I would dream of all the things I could make, then the things I could design, and blah blah blah then metal printing and so on.
So that was it the Idea had been seeded and I decided to plunge into something I had absolutely no idea about or even where to begin. Having done a bit of search engine revision wolf strapping had caught my attention, so that was it I spent one weekend with a pile of wood some draw runners and knocked up 2.5ft by 2.5ft by 2.5ft monster of a frame. And the following week my large stepper motors had arrived Nema 24 I think, fist sized anyways. Then I got some pulley/cogs but they needed boring out, needless to say I did this unfortunately not in a straight manner! I was so excited I just wanted to click my fingers and it would be built! Anyhow I'd got this contraption to a reasonable state and with the Makerbot electronics I'd ordered I had one heck of a time getting the machine calibrated just for correct axis movement. It was quite exciting seeing something I had built in motion, Computers tend to be rather static!
It wasn't until it was built to this point that I realized why the wolf strap never really had any descent documentation, It was a bad design especially exasparated by my over sizing, The Z axis would flap 10-20mm. So ok I made a mistake and it was time to move on, So this time I ordered a reprap mendel frame, of which my nema 24's wouldn't fit so I ordered the right motors and hey ho onto the next stage.
Hotend design, still in my rep strapping idea I made a hotend from fire crete and some brass tube I threaded and a heatsink drilled and tapped, I kind of got it to work a little but staying at temp was an issue, eventually I got fed up and ordered a parcan hotend, much smaller than the one I made lol.
So my next problem was getting a decent print on a makerbot driven mendel using replicatorG! I think this was my biggest mistake, but anyhow I took to IRC and asked lots of questions but no one would help someone with makerbot tronics, fortunately scribbleJ was great, so i'd loaded sjfw onto it ditched repg and used pronterface! I was in business finally, prints were coming out quite good, even got a few upgrades printed, then one day it wouldn't print. Boy was I pissed, I mean I had many moments when I thought about just tossing the printer on the floor, but that day was the worst. printer finally worked for what seemed like 5 mins then the extruder fried...... something I should chase reprap.me up for actually!
Well what you'll find is 3d printing can be like this alot, one minute fine the next a problem! so given the lack of support for MB stuff I was looking for the next best tronics I could get, now not being to adept at this hobby I applied computer buying logic...... go for the biggest number init! so I ordered a Gen7 kit off ebay, built the thing then spent months trying to get it to work. I would have a couple of problems in teacup then in sprinter the problems would switch somewhere else. but in anycase between the two all hardware was tested as fully functional so no my soldering was not the issue, any way I binned the gen7 and ordered a sanguinololu 1.3b and the ramps 1.4 i think, which could be used with the arduino mega I had! I did this to be sure I could get my printer working again. fortunately I chose the sanguino to try first and touch wood it's been brilliant since!
Oh I forgot to mention Use the best oil you can buy and oil daily for best results. seriously I had major issue on my z axis until I used a decent oil
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