Nothing is easy

I had not anticipated the difficulty in getting the parts and information that we needed to get going.

On the ordering side of things, we've found that many of the parts we need are on backorder, and in at least one case are discontinued.

Almost as obnoxious is the difficulty in getting CAD data for Mendel. For some reason, the reprap project uses Art of Illusion (a surface based modeling program) files as the native data format. These files are, so far as I can tell, impossible to import into a commercial CAD package, making measuring and modifications difficult at best. While many parts are modeled in SolidEdge, these models are not kept up to date. We have found several cases where the PAR files do not match the STLs, and since we can't effectively measure the STLs, it is difficult to verify that a PAR file is correct.