25th October - Building the frame and extruder

This is a bit of a back log as I jumped straight into the build on Tuesday as soon as the hardware arrived.

I'd ordered the Prusa hardware kit, J Head hotend, Wade's extruder hardware and some kapton tape. All the parts seemed to be present and accounted for so I set of building.

Extruder

I thought it would be easiest to start with the extruder, how wrong I was.

It all went along swimmingly until it was time to check the alignment of the hobbed bolt.
Using 2 washers it was off by about 0.5mm, so I reduced it to 1 washer. However once I'd assembled the extruder I noticed this caused the motor bolts to rub the gear.
After some disassembly, inspection and consideration I noticed that the bearing on the gear side wasn't as flush as the other side.
It was barely noticeable about 0.5mm more then the other side. Problem solved, I'll just find any bumps and sand them down. The only trouble was I couldn't see any, so I just ground them down a little and pushed the bearing in with a little more force.
This worked fine however I did have to remove the washers from the motor bolts as the clearance was extremely close.

Lesson learnt ensure the bearings on the extruder are as close to the plastic as possible and check the alignment before assembling the extruder.

I've edited a screen the the relevant section from the visual guide.

Red light is the filament path, blue block is the bearing in question
and the yellow blocks are the bolts which attach the motor

Note if the bearing (blue block) is out then the hobbed section is out.

The extruder took about 1 hour 30 minutes to make due to error and my blind haste.
I have yet to mount the hotend as I'm still considering the best way to mount it.

Frame Build

This is all fairly straight forward.

Its worth noting down which threaded rods are which as the visual guide on mentions the lengths on the BoM page then just refers to them as location rod (eg Bottom rod).
This will save a lot of time skipping from the page your one to the BoM every time you switch rod lengths.

When assembling the X axis (page 57) getting the nuts to stay in the traps is a little tricky. The easiest way to do it is get them place (I used a cable tie to poke them in) then slide a smooth rod into the hole. This way they can't slip out of the traps.

I got upto page 59 then I realised I'd misplaced the 50mm threaded rod and couldn't find it anywhere. Luckily I got one from work the following day.

Excluding the print bed (I forgot to buy the mdf, so I'll be visiting  B&Q soon) it took me just less then 2 hours to get to this stage (page 59) with the frame.

Total time spend building my reprap: 3 hours 30 minutes