Unpacking And a Little Building

All neatly laid parts of what you get in the box

Arrived home with my 8kg box of printer parts.  Read the enclosed paper work before setting out to sort all the items and check that they were all there.  I was mildly surprised find that the invoice was for £311 not the £500 I thought I'd paid.  Um, this may have meant that I didn't purchase the correct kit?  Quickly checked the website.  You can buy the kit with or without the printed plastic parts and indeed I did have the plastic parts.  I'm assuming that as I do have the plastic parts that then the prices indicated on the site must be old and that they are selling for a lot cheaper.  All is good.  Have spent about £100 less than I thought, can't be bad.

Whilst doing my research I had watched a few build videos of RepRap printers being built.  Some of those vids where done in time lapse video.  I went about to find some free software that would allow me to do the same.  Suppose I couldn't gotten an app for my Iphone to do the job, but I wanted something I could use my webcam with as this is sitting on top of my monitor and provided a nice view of my build area on the computer table.  Have never used time lapse video recording before, but have worked out that it takes a snap about every half second.  Yet to see what it actually looks like when viewed.  I will upload this to the my blog at some point to give my 'bored with text' readers something to look at.  btw I have 2 page views since I put my blog up and I think one of those was me!  Not expecting much.



All these bits go somewhere!

In the box is a big polyurethane bag full of white PLA plastic parts.  Upon inspection these parts seemed quite well made, light with not bad resolution I thought.  However I never held a 3D printed plastic part before anyway, so who was I to know.  Needed to check that I had all of them, so refered back the RepRap site and layed them out exactly as in their picture.  Yep, all parts were there  Some confusion over the U bend joints as they were different sizes and I had a fairly big box shaped item that was in the picture.  I think this must be something to encase something.  No doubt I'll find out what it is later.

This is my starting point for the build.  As you can see the way everything is laid out makes it all very clear.  The author I think his name is Adrian Bowyer instructs in a way that so far does not lead to any ambiguity.  He puts notes in areas where it's likely you could slip up and thus ensuring that you don't.  So, last night I got as far as Step 3 in the frame assembly.  This meant putting together the many threaded rods and plastic interconnects between them.  This was fun.  I took it slow, carefully measured the distances using the provided template that was shipped with the kit.  All only hand tightened at this stage.  I even went as far and making sure I had the M8 nuts the correct way round and I knew from my GCSE technical drawing days at school that nuts may seem that you put them on either way, but in fact on side is slightly more beveled than the other, meaning that the none beveled side or bottom is the end that is meant to meet the surface where it tightens up to.  Lots flicking nuts around long threaded bars!
All done for now.  Hope to get back to building soon.