Tag Archives: mendel

MakerBot, Mendel, Mendel-Mini Build Areas

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Owning a MakerBot, I’m not even sure why someone would need something to print pieces much larger than the MakerBot build area.  Printing something as large as just the maximum build volume of a MakerBot would take ages.

While the official longest print logged on the Makerbot website is Zach’s Disney head, clocking in at 2 hours and 45 minutes, I’ve read about people printing for up to 8 continuous hours.  If the build volume for a Mendel is 4.3 times that of a Makerbot, it would take more than 34 hours to fill that build area.

When you’re printing a door hook in 15 minutes, it doesn’t pay to drive to the hardware store.  When it takes 34 hours to print a big plastic brick, you’re better off driving to the gas station, filling up your tank, driving to McDonald’s, filling out an application, working an hour, quitting and demanding your paycheck, driving to the hardware store, buying a single brick, and then driving back home.  I figure that kind of silliness would only take half a day or so.  Heck, with 34 hours, you could do this at least six times over.

Dragging my feet on PLA

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I’ve been a total slacker about getting started printing in PLA.  Part of the reason is I’ve seen others have a lot of problems printing with it – ruining extruders, oozing out of barriers, too hot, too cold, too just right, the heat is uneven, the barrel jams, etc, etc.  However, since I’ve been printing larger and larger objects I’m finding that warpage is become more of an issue.  This means I need to either buy/make a heated platform for the ABS or I need to switch to PLA.

There’s a few things I’d like to build that are big and flat.  I’d like to print up a modular chess board (already have it designed in my head, I just need to export it to Sketchup) and crank out a few Mendel or Mini Mendel pieces.

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Is it an evil replicator?

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Over at the RepRap blog Vic has posted a picture and a link to the files for a mini-Mendel.  He suggests that since the reprapped parts are 30% of the full-size Mendel, it should replicate at three times the speed!

A loooong time ago I was at a friend’s place when we were discussing how best to send files.  This was back when I had saved up for a 14.4 modem.  (A modem?  What’s that?)  I suggested we just keep using PKZip to zip the files, then zip the zip files, until the resulting files were so small they could fit on a single floppy disk.  For those of you youngin’s out there, this is called “sneakernet” – as in you walk the files from place to place.

The idea that the smaller we make RepRap machines the faster replicate is simultaneously amazing, silly, and scary.  Amazing because it means we really only need to produce a modest sized RepRap which could then print up the parts for a larger cousin or many of its similar sized brethren.  Silly because it makes me think of zipping zipped files – let’s keep making RepRaps infinitely small so that they are infinitely quick to replicate!  Scary (well, not really scary, but you get the point) because it reminds me of the gray-goo problem – where the world is taken over by machines that turn the planet into copies of the machines.