So I recently built a Reprap 3d Printer.  I am going to detail a few things I had to figure out and find to get it running optimally.

First I bought a Reprap Prusa kit with assembled electronics from Makergear.com.  They offer the cheapest kits around and I can say that the build quality is very high for that low price.  They include lots of stuff along with the essential parts.  These include allen wrenches, a level, a spacing assistant that is a piece of lasercut wood, and tons of extra nuts and bolts.  They must get the hardware at some cheap prices to include so many extras.  The printed parts for the reprap are great.  They are incredibly well made. 

The build of the reprap followed the regular reprap build guide except for certain steps that were either listed in maker gear’s build guide or on their website like plastruder.  The directions the new heated bed are not included much at all.  It is just a few wires and securing it to the board but the placement of the thermistor (temperature sensor) was not outlined.  I just placed mine in a corner so not to be bothered.  

Overall the build took about 2 whole days.  I conducted mine in two different places due to the fact that I got it while in Mississippi at Ash’s parents and then a day after traveled to tennessee then to my parent’s house back in West Virginia.  The bulk of the machine and most of the extruder was finished while in Mississippi.   While in West Virginia I assembled it all and wired the endstops.  I then commenced the long process of testing and tweaking the software and hardware settings.

The hardware settings involved getting the heated bed platform to be level with the extruder over the whole surface.  This makes the prints come out so much better.  The endstops were set and reset to improve build quality.  The software was a different story.

Right now there are multiple programs to run your reprap.  A few are Repsnapper, Repstrapper (I think), PrintRun.  Printrun is what I am currently running with great ease.  This connects to the printer, allows you to move all the motors and turn the extruder and heated bed on.  It also displays the process of the print.  It also can use plugins to slice the stl files.  I do this a bit differently though.  

There are a few ways to slice your prints into gcode that the printer understands.  The first and major program is skeinforge.  There are multiple programs built atop this engine.  One is ReplicatorG, its well liked but it is slow and mainly built for Makerbots.  Another program is called Sfact, it uses skeinforge but speeds it up greatly.  It is a horrible looking program with a ton of buttons.  Another is Slic3r.  This is the program I run to slice my models that I export from my cad program, Autodesk Inventor.  It is a simple little program that slices very quickly with great results.  Everything is presented well and it works.  After adjusting the settings to the correct amounts by trial and error I have my printer spitting out great prints.

In conclusion I have had some fun and frustrating times building my reprap but overall it was worth the effort. I can now produce plastic versions of my designs on my desk.  I highly recommend one of the many different 3d printers on the market.

I have all the hardware and electronics assembled but I am now working on it communicating with my computer.  It was not as simple as plug and play.  I will post some pre cleanup photos in a few minutes.  I got it tuesday morning and built all of tuesday.  I have a nice timelapse shot collection from my goPro that Ash got me of the hardware build.  I worked some wednesday on the extruder and wiring.  We then drove to tennessee, stayed the night and then drove to west virginia.  I got the electronics finished last night after arriving at my parents.  Now its just getting my computer sending commands to it and it’ll be printing.