Mendel90

My first step into the world of 3D printing came with a choice. Which 3D printer to start with?

Because 3D printing is it in it’s infancy, there is not a huge choice when it comes to ready built desktop printers aimed at the consumer market, and those that there are out of my price range. Perhaps the most popular pre assembled printer is the Makerbot Replicator 2, which although highly regarded retails at $2000. At that price it is hard to justify for what is essentially a useful toy.

However, there is another alternative. The RepRap project is an ongoing international project created by enthusiasts, with the aim of designing and building better 3D printers. The eventual goal of RepRap is to make an entirely self replicating machine, and while this a long way off, the community has made a major contribution to the development and adoption of 3D printing technology in the home. Perhaps the best part of the project, for someone like me at least, is that everything developed is open source and free to use. That means that any one with the time and skill and the spare cash to buy the parts can use the build guides provided to assemble their own 3D printer. This reduces the overall cost, due to negating the need to pay for the development and assembly of the machine.

Whilst you can do everything from scratch, including sourcing all the parts and materials yourself, I made the choice to make my job a little easier by purchasing a kit. This saved me from having to find a reseller for every individual part, and there is little difference in price between buying a kit and sourcing the parts yourself, as a kit maker can buy the parts in bulk and take the saving they make as their profit. Also buying a kit is a good way to reduce the chances of you encountering problems, like purchasing a hundred incorrectly sized screws.

Having made the decision to purchase a kit, I started looking at which one to go for. RepRap recommends either the Prusa Mendel or Huxley to start with. I would probably have gone with the Prusa, but as fortune has it I met with the designer of the Mendel90 at a local 3D printing workshop, and as I mentioned in a previous post, this made my choice of which design to go for an easy choice. One major problem with buying kits or parts from a community project is that there has been known cases of scamming, where people take money for parts and then disappear without delivering. Knowing the kits makers as real people helped me reduce the worry of being a victim. It also gave me a contact point if anything I bought was faulty.

There are also some advantages of the Mendel90 over the more established Prusa Mendel. Most notably, the Mendel90 is made of pieces of sheet material, held at 90 degrees to each other, rather than the Prusa Mendel’s triangular design. In the kit this is made of Dibond, a composite material consisting of two aluminium sheets, but the Mendel90 can be made using more common materials such as MDF.  The major advantages of this is that it makes construction and calibration slightly easier, as there are no tricky angles in the machine. For me this a plus as I was slightly cautious about self assembly and anything that makes it simpler is a plus in my book. Also the Mendel90 is a lot more attractive than the Prusa Mendel!

My kit was £500 when I purchased it. However I have been informed by the kit makers that the price has since been increased to £600 due to the having to become VAT registered. Either way this is still very affordable in comparison with the other options on the market. I also had to take into account buying tools for assembly, because I didn’t own a soldering iron, multimeter, digital callipers and a few other odds and ends needed to assemble the machine. These added another £100 or so the cost, but these are tools that it are useful for other projects I can do – in particular they allow me to add amateur electronic parts to items I make in the printer (such as LEDs).

The couple who provided me with the kit informed me that my kit was around the 150th they have sold, so including people who have built a Mendel90 but didn’t buy a kit, there probably aren’t more than 200-300 of these things in the world.

The plastic parts in the kit were themselves printed on another Mendel90. This kind of cool, but does add a bit of waiting time to any purchase order, as the kit builder’s machines need to run round the clock to meet demand. It took about 2 weeks for mine to be sent out after payment, but that gave me time to read the manual and buy the tools I needed.

The build went well, so in my next post I will run through the process of building a Mendel90.