A Work in Progress

Hi world so just wanted to say that as of now me and my dad are working really hard on the design of our next masterpiece. We are up to the point where things need to start being enlarged, first off we had to separate all of the pieces in the original design and then work on each piece individually. After that was done we needed to add more of the areas for the screws to go into. So it's always a work in progress. However I did find a little nifty program that I can take awsome screen shots of what we are up to so expect those to be up anytime this coming week. We hope everyone is as excited us at coming up with this crazy idea of mine. Hopefully by the end of this week we will have all of the laser cut parts all designed and ready to send up to our friends at Make-It-Labs!!

Design Time

So today me and my dad worked on separating the pieces of the original design down to layers. At this point we need to start working on making things tall and large! Lucky for us we are using Qcad so it's pretty easy to do this with. Today when I got home I also went and felt like doing a little bit of Printing so i fired up the old maker bot and made a starfish. Then after it finished I realised that the version of the software (ReplicatorG) was not the one that I had used previously. So it was spitting out more plastic than it had to, and not moving the steppers fast enough. On a different note today I was asked a question by my friend Bryan Round, "why would you want to make something 4 feet tall?" To answer your question Bryan, by making it 4 feet tall i have the ability to make tall objects such as a sword which if I am right in saying is on thingaverse. With this object you would normally have to glue it together, with this design you are able to make it all in one piece. We are moving closer to going to visit our friends up at Make It Labs hopefully we will be able to come up around November. I can't wait until I will at least be able to make the Exo-skeleton for this (hopefully world record holding) machine.

Back to the Basics

Ok so to start with this project I need to first go back to the basics. First with going back to the basics we need to start out and make a whole new design. I am going to take the original Utilimaker design http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:8563 and then, go and really stretch it out. This design is not going to be a walk in the park, first off I need to start to add the notches that the utilimaker has in the side just like makerbot to hold the screws. On top of that i need to figure out how big my build platform can be. Even with the idea of having it 4 feet tall and 2 feet wide it is going to have to be smaller, this way the build platform is able to move. Now by now you are all probably thinking what inspired me to come up with the idea of 4 feet by 2 feet? While believe it or not I am contouring this printer to be the exact size of the laser cutter I have access to. It's going to be a tight fit but I will stop at nothing to concur this monster of a machine!

Getting Started

Hi everyone, with this blog i plan on sharing my tales of building one of the worlds LARGEST 3D printers!! I am planning on building a Utilimaker that is 4 feet tall and 2 feet wide!! I picked the Utilimaker because of the design of the extruder, which i forgot to mention I am adding 4 of them to this design. The Utilimaker has a unique design for the extruder where it has the pinch wheel in the rear of the printer. It then sends it over to the actual extruder head which uses a heater cartridge to heat up the plastic and then spits it out of the extruder. The other neat thing about this design is that the head moves instead of being stationary and because I have the availability to incorporate 4 into my design..... I will