Mendel z-axis stepper mounts done

I managed to get some hours together to do some more work on my son's Prusa Mendel, the z-axis stepper mounts this time.

I printed the z-axis stepper mounts at a 45 degree angle to minimize parts preparation time and avoid warping.

I'm now working on the x-axis stepper and idler mounts.  My son processed the stepper mount last night and I did the idler mount this morning.  They're printing this evening.

Mendel frame takes shape...

I had a major crash of the Rapman 3.0 printer and for several hours I thought I was really knackered. One of the leads to a phase of the extruder stepper parted because of fatigue from thousands of hours of vibration. The system shut down and reset. At first I thought I had a simple static discharge event, the first in many months. I fired the system back up and discovered that the extruder stepper would dance around but wouldn't pump filament.

After serious prayers that the stepper driver chip for the extruder hadn't fried I rewired the connector and got the extruder pumping ABS again only to discover that the intense vibration from the stepper before the reset had actually shaken apart the Arcol extruder hot end that I had bought from László Krekács in Hungary.

This sounds worse than it was. I simply screwed it all back together and cleaned the extruder end and it worked perfectly again. Unfortunately, I will have to recalibrate Rapman now. That should take a few hours that I didn't have available today.

In any case, I was able to cobble the Prusa Mendel frame together this morning.

It's a dinky little thing, but interesting all the same.

Printing a Mendel derivative

After talking with my son recently, I concluded that he needs to start printing a lot faster than I'm going to have Sampo debugged and duplicated. I have a lot of 8 mm linear shafting and linear bearings in stock, so I decided to build him a Mendel derivative using Sampo firmware and controllers. That should get him printing a lot faster than would otherwise be the case.

I started printing parts for a Prusa Mendel yesterday. So far, so good. Got the gantries finished and am printing the rest of the parts now.

5/16th inch threaded rod is pretty much a one on one replacement for M8, #8 machine screws replace M4s and #4 machine screws replace M3s.  I couldn't see much point in printing the SAE Mendel.  I'm going to have to redesign the extruder carriage to seat linear bearings instead of those strange PLA things it ordinarily uses.