Rapman assembly part 1

A couple of years ago a bunch of people (including myself) here in Brisbane pooled their funds to buy a Reprap kit... and then never found the time to put it together. Oops.

Anyway, since I currently have oodles of free time I've taken over Hackerspace Brisbane the past few days and started assembling it.

It's taking forever going really well! I have all the electronics (early version Gen 2 RRRF boards as they were bought back in 2008) and the majority of the X carriage assembly put together. The carriage itself doesn't yet slide freely enough on the rails for me to completely assemble it, but I think I'll leave it for a while and move on to the corner blocks tomorrow.

One of the pieces was broken during delivery and I broke another piece or two trying to get some of the holes cleared where the laser didn't cut deep enough. So I whipped up a batch of acrylic cement last night ready for me to do field repairs. The cement is just acrylic chips (of which there are plenty left over once the reprap pieces are removed from the sheet) dissolved in acetone. Put the chips and just enough acetone to cover them in a container that won't itself melt in the solvent, seal the container and leave it for several hours. The acrylic doesn't so much dissolve as slowly soften as the solvent infiltrates the material. Once it's gooey enough you can smear some of it between the broken pieces and clamp them together. After leaving the piece for a couple of hours to let the acetone evaporate completely the resultant piece is as strong as if it had never been broken in the first place!

I did say I'd taken over the space, didn't I? :) We should probably clean up the other desk so I can spread across it too so we have some space for anyone else coming on Tuesday night...