Pop!Tech is a yearly conference on technical issues of world concern and on the technical innovations that may improve the future. In 2007 Adrian was one of the invited speakers. Follow this link to watch the talk.
RepRap was invited to the Cheltenham Science Festival in June 2008. While we were all explaining RepRap to the visitors, Vik's RepRap child machine was busy making a vacuum pump that he had designed. Here it is working.
This is the prototype design for a field's metal extrude head. It uses the same brass tube that we use for the polymer extruder, and the same nozzle. The tube has a smaller silicone tube inside it and a notch filed in it. A solenoid clamps the silicone at the notch. There's a brass cup at the top full of field's metal (melting point 50oC). All the brass parts are heated by wrapping them in nichrome wire set in JB Weld in our usual way.
Roll on electric circuits. Roll on electric circuits in full 3D...
The best doctor blade is a sharp V notch which you run the extrude head over once to clean it. This works really well, but the extruded junk builds up in the V. So this little lever, nudged by the extrude head before it cleans itself, cleans out the last bit of extrude junk. As you can see, this one is made from bits of scrap plastic. We'll ad an RP version to the RepRap design soon.
Beaded belt (or ball chain ) being used in a temporary setup on the RepRap as proof of principle. The beaded belt is obtainable from most hardware stores and is used to hold plugs to baths with. Being able to print belt gears will mean there is no need to cast them from CAPA.
Printing the optoswitch bracket on Darwin, in Capa.
Adrian has an MSc student, Arman Ghandizadehdezfuli, who is looking at Mendel for the future. Here's a video of the prototype extruder changer that he's designed being tested in Darwin. (The slight jerkiness is all from the cheapo webcam software; the actual movements were clean and smooth.)
On the 18 and 19 of April 2007 Adrian assembled our first RepRap Version 1.0 "Darwin" from scratch and shot a time-lapse video of the entire thing at one frame every three seconds. It took him four and a half hours spread over the two days.
An attempt to print a corner bracket for the Darwin RepRap design fails when the workpiece detaches itself from the stage, and takes on a life of its own. 2.5 sec/frame time-lapse.
A time-lapse video of a hexagonal test object being printed on the Zaphod RepRap prototype. 2.5 sec/frame.
A new extruder design with the motor and drive offset, to allow a perfectly straight run down the drive thread for brittle or stiff extrude filaments.
A prototype RepRap paste extruder, made from a fizzy drink bottle and a balloon...
(Slightly surreally, the sound track consists of a musical biography on Radio 3; I was listening, and forgot to turn it off...)
The first gears made, produced on the Zaphod RepRap prototype from 2.5mm polycaprolactone filament. A bit rough, but they mesh.
The "Da Witch" prototype extruding a test object onto a glass plate.
Attempt by Metalab in Vienna to make an X-axis prototype from something looking a lot like Meccano or Tinkertoy.
Video of the RepRap "Zaphod" prototype in operation at Paraflows '06 in Vienna, including the RepRap logo printed by the prototype.
Johannes Grenzfurthner interviewing Vik Olliver about the RepRap on Austrian TV's Taugshow
The first extruded extruder, sans nozzle, slowly moving filament from one place to the other.
