Patches Sees Red

I'm printing in our nice, new batch of Cherry Red, so Patches is in for another colour change. For the moment, the red bits are sitting there pending a teardown. Note that the new X bearings are far more accessible and I've added malleting points to protect the bearing holders.

Those purple corners are due for a redesign. They need to be able to screw to a baseboard (skips all 4 metal rods at the bottom if you do that, but needs 8 screws) and I am planning on mounting the Arduino Mega clone (NZ$65 from yours truly:) on the one in the left of the photo.

There are a few minor fixes that I won't bother re-printing, but not much so I hope to be able to release the files for public ridicule next week.

Oh, the Z motor tested successfully! Now on to the Y. I might need to redo the edges of the bevel gears but I think I'll get away with it for now.

Excluding gears (10) and the extruder there are 14 printed parts to the Simpleton design.

Oh blast! Forgot to add the cavity for the Y limit switch!

It's just a matter of firmware...

The "Simpleton" RepRap design continues apace. Now I have the snap-on X carriage figured out and enough pieces in place to wire up the electronics. A few things to sort out still: Some access to nuts is too tricky, the bed corners bump into the endstops a bit early as does the Z axis, the Y captive nut is wrong, and the access to the X drive rod bearings is going to need to be redone.

Still, as it sits on the bench it does a 210mmx190mmx170mm build envelope and weighs 3.6kg, so I haven't lost too much space or gained much weight. Time to start the finer details like built-in cable management and proper endstop holders.

Quite proud of the little CNC-mill-like handles to manually adjust X & Y :)