Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Next blog

If you press the "next blog" button at the top of the page, then you get a random post.  Here's what I got in order that I clicked
Shards of My Sanity 

International Tina Turner Fanclub
Real Women Have Curves
Prowling Sheep

I had to stop at the sheep.

Construction begins . . .

In the last week, we got the orders from McMaster and Dell Fastener in. We still need to order bearings, motors, and electronics, as well as a few other things.

So, we started in on the grunt work last night.

There was a lot of discussion about how to proceed. One of the big things was what to do about the problem of engineering drawings. Adam suggested that it was probably worthwhile for us to do our own drawings and assembly for two reasons: First, it gives us a better understanding of how the C-Rap goes together, and second, it allows us to be more consistent in our construction and modification of future versions. Those of us with access to a CAD package will start working on that over the next two weeks.

Once we got that out of the way, we broke up into groups: a few of the guys went down to the dungeon and cut the threaded stud and rod to size,

a few started cutting out corner vertices (we decided that we were going to make as many parts as possible out of MDF)

and Devin started looking at making real parts out of these pesky STL files.

Now that we have an idea what needs to happen for each part we make by hand, I think it will go a bit faster.

The next meeting will be on March 1st. Same time, Same place.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Weather

There was no meeting (or pizza or beer) this week, due to a fairly impressive snowstorm that has blanketed the east coast.

We'll try again next week

Thursday, February 4, 2010

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.

Orders Aweigh!

I sent out two orders for stuff today.

McMaster-Carr is sending us rods, belts, and a few other misc items.
Dell Fastener is sending all the screws and nuts

I'll add order specifics later.

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