I am starting a Credit Union for Reprap over at the Reprap Wiki. I came up with a very original name for it SpaceXULA Union. :)
Here are the terms:
The Fees:
$100 Mini Mendel (Current Version as http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3581($50 back if you replace within a month)
$30 Prinstruder II http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1980($15 back if you replace within a month)
$40 Wades Extruder http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3069($20 back if you replace within a month)
The "Terms"
-To receive parts you must have Hacker space or group with multiple members (And have some way to confirm this to SpaceXULA's satisfaction).
-You must promise to form a bank once you have an operating RepRap.
-You must pay a deposit before I send the parts
-You must be within the United States (Sorry, Import dues make international shipping unfair to the receiver)
The Benefits
-SpaceXULA promises to support you though to completion of your project, you are getting a relationship. You get the parts, and if you need more parts because you break them, or the design changes before you can get your own printer operational, he will provide them as 1st priority prints.
-If SpaceXULA receives a set of parts back from you within 1 month of the day you receive the parts, he will PayPal back to you 1/2 the cost of the part to you.
If your interested, please add your RepRap Wiki user name under Aplicant, and I will contact you right away.
I have 5 Wades Extruders, 2 Prinstruder II, and 1/2 of a Mini Mendel ready to go.
It took me well over a month to build my mini mendel and get it printing, and I was tooling around with ideas for a repstrap for some time before that. Things picked up considerably once I realized that I could get parts from mcmaster locally, but sourcing parts, especially with budget considerations to think about, can take some time. Once the RP parts, rods, bearings, belts, nuts and bolts are procured, it shouldn't take more than a weekend to build, but after building I also had trouble with the electronics and then with the software that delayed me. Then I had a hell of a time trying to build a reliable extruder and hot-end, and when I finally did, it required machining metal parts in ways that many users will not be ready to do, and that I wasn't ready to do when I started.
ReplyDeleteI guess what I'm saying is, do you know why your mendel sets aren't printing? It may be because people lost interest, but it could also be that they need help getting it working, or do not yet have the budget for some of the parts they need. Given your "hackerspace with multiple members" requirement, it may turn out to be reasonable, but I don't think it's a good idea in general to assign deadlines for a project that still takes so much hacking to get working.
As a side note, I suspect that the thing that would be most helpful to getting repraps and repstraps printing in the wild would be to sell fully assembled and TESTED extruders (including a reliable, non-nichrome hot end). This would allow existing cartesian bots, for which there are may designs online, to become repstraps.
+1 for the idea of a tested,packaged extruder that works with a conventional cnc 3 axis mill.
ReplyDeleteI am a hobbiest, and have created my own 3-axis router. it works great and uses primarily 'standard' parts and EMC2 for control.
If there had been an EMC compatible, turn-key extruder that bolts on as an axis, i'd have been willing to pay $200 or so for such an assembly. But there wasnt. This is because Repraps' formal goals are self-printing. Thus, there are a lot of unorganized hackers out there working to make repstraps, but they all 'abandon' perfectly good machines because they are not a 'real' reprap.
But, since there were not such products, i ended up doing what it seems others have done: i created my own project with the
goal of creating an extruder who's design and controls are
intended to act on an existing 3-axis platform:
http://cncfdm.blogspot.com
This is one of the reasons why I still want an official reprap family tree. One where the parents, children, and new seeds can register so that we can see the evolving progress, or lack thereof. It can be a way of motivating ourselves, seeing the children and grandchildren spread etc. Without it we have no way of measuring one of the core reprap goals.
ReplyDelete