Questions about building a 3D printer

Yes you can convert a ShapeOko into a 3d printer. Only problem is you have to replace your electronics as a ShapeOko only has 3 Stepper Drivers on it's board. You will atleast have to upgrade to a RAMP 1.4 system for the electronics support
A cheap and very usefull 3d printer is from MakerFarm. I have posted a build of their kit here. http://www.openbuilds.com/builds/bobs-3d-printer-kit-build.651/ The kit is for a 8" x 8" x 7 3/4" build volume and it uses V-slot for the movement. They also have a 10" kit available for less than $600.00.

Bob

 

Yes you did

 

It looks like they're using too small of steppers and the acrylic will eventually cause problems. The extruder and hot end combination also looks weak and almost guaranteed has bad thermal properties.

You might get lucky with a certain material at a certain speed though. The prusa i3 isn't a bad design, but there's a ton of people putting out less than desirable kits to be a part of the race to the bottom.

 

http://reprap.org/wiki/Prusa_i3_Buyers_Guide

 

* Don't overtighten
* Don't use loctite, or any other form of glue without being absolutely certain it's acrylic safe. It probably isn't.
* You'll hate the nuts you slide in from the side with one hand, while you hold the two parts in place with your other hand, and tighten the screw with the other hand.
* Don't overtighten. No, really-- Watch the surface, if you start seeing rainbows, you're already too tight, back off a bit.


https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/3dprintertipstricksreviews/N3MVCCa1lg0

Things you normally do to keep your printer rigid (only way to get good prints is to have a rigid printer), you can't do very well with acrylic, because it gets stress cracks very easily.

The kit will come with good parts that are a reasonable price even without the acrylic frame and low current steppers. If you decided to build a better printer with most of the same parts you could later on without much lost. There's an i3 variant on here with all vslot, another option you could probably do without needing much else (if your printer can print the parts) is something like the Wilson TS. http://reprap.org/wiki/Category:Wilson

 

I posted the link to that google group, because someone bought the same kit you did. I see that kind of buy everyday. It's so cheap that people can't say no. I've helped a whole lot of people with printer calibrations / fixes. There's some things you can go cheap on and some things you can't.

One big thing that I come across that drives me the most crazy is the amount of people who think they can build a hotend from scratch that will work well, not many people in the world have done that, and hotend thermals are extremely important for worry free printing. An easy way to waste countless frustrating hours is to use a bad hotend.

 

Stepper motors first. Hot end and extruder second.

 

Also, start out with PLA. Abs and acrylic aren't friends. You won't need any venting or enclosure for PLA and your prints will be more rigid.

 

Abs needs a lot of heat and gasses off. It's also several times harder to get consistently good prints with.

Abs was designed for injection molding because it shrinks and pops itself free from molds. That amount of shrinkage causes several problems in FFF printing. It's cheap is why it's used. And it's cheap because it's widely used for a different application.

In not saying don't use it, just don't start with it.

 

If you have a jigsaw you can use some MDF or melamine board and cut out the Mendel90 frame and attach your parts to it and have a very rigid very square printer.