My 3d printing saga : Part 2 - Reinforcements Are Here!

Hey guys,

This is the second part of my blog posts on my prusa i3 build, if you havn't read the previous episode, you can find it here - http://www.h4hacks.com/2015/06/beginning-of-my-3d-printing-saga-first.html

Apologies to my readers as i am taking so long to write about the work that i have done. I request everyone to be patient, (lot of you guys ask me on facebook and all, Thanks) as i am finding it quite difficult to find time to do so.

Ok now if you have read my first post, then you know that i made a huge mistake by buying the whole kit from the cheapest Indian seller at that time (Sep 2014). So whats done is done, i want to build a 3D printer. So i decided to burn lot more cash to replace all the crappy parts that was in the kit i bought.

First of all, I purchased a new set of printed parts from global easy buy in ebay (geb.ebay.in). Here i bought a set of neatly printed prusa i3 parts. You can see the difference here

Y Idler end

Neat quality

Finally working frame piller :-)

Nice quality X carriage

Good quality

Now that I have all the good quality printed parts i wanted to upgrade some other items from the kit too.

A direct drive extruder

All metal hotend

So Finally I got some good parts for building this prusa. Now all that is left is do start building it. So here we go

The Build

I don't want to bore you guys with all the detailed build instructions of prusa its already neatly documented on the reprap wiki pages and there are plenty of youtube videos. So instead of all that lets have a picture by picture progress of the build

The Y Axis frame

So First i built the y axis and the base frame of prusa.

Base frame - Y axis

My Room was all messy as usual

The Move

In the midst of this build i had to shift myself to a new home. Man that was challenging, I had to pack all of my hardware and move it to new place. 

Reached new home

All tools and parts are safe :)

And i have unpacked everything and started with the build again :-)

all stuff back on the ground

Y axis build progressing

Added Y motor

Aligning stuff

Belt added for Y

Heat bed mounted

How does it look?

So the Y axis is almost good now. Lets progress with others

The X Axis

Now lets see the x axis build

X axis rail with extruder tray

With direct drive extruder

The Z axis and X axis marriage :-)

Lets quickly see how i put together the X axis and the Z axis together

X and Z together :-)

Completing the frame

Lets go ahead and complete the frame of Prisa by merging it all together

Finally

Looks like a prusa :-)

Setting up the electronics

So now that the frame is up we need to work on electronics. I am using a standard RAMPS 1.4 board and if you have done some homework that you may already know that the MOSFET's in ramps heat up badly after some time. So my first task was to put some heatsinks on them

Here are those guys who heat up

I made these hand cut aluminium pieces

Ramps heatsink

Now that looks fine. Now i will mount the extruder and connect everything

Extruder is completed :-)

All motors are connected

This cool fan mount helps

Now for holding the filament spool i created this holder with help of some PVC pipe, cheap and very effective :-)

Cool holder

PVC looks awesome

Testing and Printing

Now that everything is ready lets just test it

Repetier Host

Configuring

Finally lets print something

First Print

So excited

This was done at 12:05 AM 1st Jan 2015

Looks good

Awesome feeling

Looks almost perfect

Good results

Lord Ganesha 3d printed

3dprinted lord ganesha

My own design

securid slot

Before printing

Before printing

After printing

After printing

Cool Guy

He says hi

Cool Phone Holder

Wow Creepy

But its cool

Awesome

So that's how i got my printer working. There is lot of stuff i missed to write here. Please feel free to ask any doubts you have on the below comments section and please subscribe and watch my videos

So Here is a video of my printer in action. Watch and don't forget to subscribe