Coming back

Hi,

After a hiatus (I love the sound of this word) and a few false starts I'm finally managing to set aside some time (and funds) to get this project back up and running.

The hiatus

For anyone wondering where I've been or why I just suddenly stop blogging/printing it was an accumulation of things.

Firstly just as I was getting into the swing of things (after I fixed my numerous errors) my sister purchased a house which was in a state of disrepair. So for nearly three months every weekend, most week nights and any holidays.
Shortly following this she got pregnant with her first child, which happened to be the first child in the house/family for nearly 18 years. Everything went baby mad from scans to cloths to baby proofing the house to panicking about all the projects in the house to get ready so everything was perfect for the baby.
Part of the preparation was my bedroom being surrendered as it was one of the largest bedrooms in place of a room about 1/2 the size. This massively threw off my printing setup as I had dedicated an area for the printer and in the new the same space would have taken up 1/3rd of it.

The first false start

Skip forward until after the birth, quite a while after if I'm honest, it was a c section and my mother setup her own business which kept everyone busy. I set about getting back into printing so I set about upgrading the build to something more reliable and for better prints.
For this I purchased a heated bed kit and set about installing it. At this point I noticed another mistake with my original build. The print bed was the wrong dimensions (250mm² instead of 225mm²).
I managed to fix the issue best as I could (cutting it down and sanding).
While doing this I noticed one of the PLA bushings on the Z had come loose so I set about fixing that too.
On top of the heated bed I had also ordered a replacement electronic, as the original RAMPS 1.4 I soldered, while working, wasn't pretty or safe (I'll post pictures soon).
This time I picked RAMPS 1.3 which is essentially the same only all through hole making it a lot easier to solder.
After some calibration and some tweaking. I did a few test prints and was happy with the results.
While I was setting up for some bigger prints (lm8uu conversion) the Z endstop cracked (made from ABS and was under pressure to keep it locked), luckily I had a spare from the original prints I did. However I checked my box of replacement parts and noticed a lot of them had disappeared.
At this point fearing something else would break and cause the hotend to break the new print bed I started looking for replacement parts online.
Nophead had just released plans for the mendel90 and the whole RepRap community was throwing out Prusa tweaks and designs left right and center.
So I stored the printer away and told myself I would I'd look into it at a later date when everything had settled down.

Second hiatus

With the printer on the back burner I turned my attention to fruit and vegetable gardening and fishing.
It started off as a few tomato and cucumber plants in a greenhouse to a bit of an obsession.
I had

• ~36 garlic plants, 
• 20 or so broad bean plants
• 5 rats tail radish trees
• 3 different varieties of tomatoes (12 plants in total)
• 3 cucumbers
• 3 buckets of oriental greens
• 3 buckets of carrots
• 3 buckets of spring onions
• A trough of oriental greens and kale
• A large trough of lettuce and radish
• 2 buckets of asparagus peas
• 5 trays of peashoots
• 5 jalapeño plants
• ~6 buckets of potatoes
• And lot of other veg

So in-between fishing, gardening, good weather and everything else I thought little about the printer.

Second and shortest false start

Before Christmas last year I thought it would be nice to make some customer prints for the family as present and decorations.
Within 30 minutes of checking the print became apparent that; a the printer desperately need money and time spending on it and b it needed moving so that it would be impossible for my niece to get to it (she has an obsession with my room and removing random items for some reason).

Current plan

My current plan is to do a direct upgrade to Prusa i3 (based on Mendel90 I believe) reusing parts where I can.
I'll detail my plan and notes in a post shortly.

In the meantime I've found a lot of posts I saved in drafts but never scheduled or released. Most of them are seller reviews which was a new concept I planned on doing; a review of each seller I used, prices and the product recieved. A lot of these will be out of date and glancing at them some (if not most) have stopped trading.
Having said this they will link in perfectly with the new parts I'm ordering so I'll be posting them soon.