Hello World!

Hello, people of the interwebs!

This is to be my build log of a Prusa i3. I am hoping to be able to release a stable and complete Bill of Materials for the sheet style frame in the future.

For those of you who have no idea what the heck a RepRap is, I would point you to reprap.org. Reprap, which is an abbreviation of “Replicating Rapidly”, was founded by Adrian Bowyer. The goal of the project is to design  a rapid prototyping machine that can print its own parts. Almost all, if not all of the commercially available home 3D printers on the market were either inspired by or derived from RepRaps, such as the Makerbot, Lulzbot, Printrbot, Ultimaker, and more. 

This brings us to the question of what, exactly, 3D printing is. 3D printing is a form of additive manufacturing. This means that it adds material to an object to build it up, layer by layer. There are several methods of doing this, including using lasers to fuse powders or resins together. But the method most commonly used at the consumer level is called Fused Deposition Modeling. This means that it squirts plastic to build an object. A toolhead known as the extruder moves around on a build platform. It squirts plastic along a path sent by a computer. Then it moves up a fraction of a millimeter, and repeats the process, until enough layers have been put down to make the object.

 

I don’t have all the parts yet to build  my printer, but I’ll start blogging as I start building….

 

Adios for Now!