Earlier last week, I received the last of the parts I needed to build a RepRap Mendel. When finished, the printer will be able to fabricate 3D parts out of plastic, opening the door for mechanical design aspects of current and future NBitWonder projects. Eager to get started, I set out building the device.

According to the build page on the RepRap, Mendel can be constructed over the course of one weekend. Depending on your definition of weekend, that could span as much as 72 hours (or more for those of you with 4-day weekends). Regardless, the weekend has passed, I’m about 15 hours into the build, and still have a long way to go.

The first step in the process was preparing the parts. The RepRap parts have bits of structural plastic clinging to them as artifacts of the printing process, so these need to be carefully and thoroughly cleaned with a hobby knife. All told, this took about an hour.

You may notice that the RepRap parts are not all the same color. Part way through the printing process, Marc ran out of red (the original color) and switched to black. I think the red and black combination looks rather striking!

In the standard Mendel build instructions, the extruder comes next. I was unsure how many left over nuts and bolts I would have from the Mendel kit to use on the extruder, so I skipped that for the moment and proceeded to the X-axis build.

X-axis carriage block:

X-axis idler block:

X-axis 180-degree vertical bearing:

X-axis 360-degree vertical bearing:

X-axis motor block:

You can see more pictures of the RepRap build process in our flickr set!

With the x-axis blocks done, I set out to make the blocks for the Y- and Z- axes. Once all blocks are made, I’ll have a much better idea of what is left over for use in the extruder build, and what I have to go buy. Unfortunately, the parts kit I got seems to have woefully underestimated the number of M4 nuts required to build the kit, and so I had to stop building for the evening until I can get a fresh round of parts from a hardware store tomorrow.