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.