Stephen brought his lathe in to the lab so we could work on fabricating the “hot end” of a RepRap 3D printer, the part which melts and extrudes the plastic. The hot end parts are the awkward bits of the design, because they can’t be 3D printed by another machine, or bought off the Read more about RepRap extruder nozzle[…]
Here’s the machine from March’s RepRap build party, still lacking its extruder but joining our collection of robotic devices writing ‘hacklab’ at the lab. The machine belongs to Edinburgh University, but we’re helping to get it up and running so it can print a set of parts for the Hacklab’s own RepRap Mendel.
For those of you not following on the mailing list, this was the first live cutting done by our CNC mill conversion a couple of weeks back. Now we just need to complete the automation of the Z-axis, which is in progress.