My Prusa I3 MK3!

In March, I finally placed an order for a Prusa I3 MK3 3D printer. I had been planning to buy a 3D printer for a while. At first, I wanted to get one of those cheap I3 clones, but after reading a lot of user experiences I decided to spend the extra money and get an original Prusa I3. Bottom line is: the cheap clones are ok printers, but you have to spend a lot of time to get them to print more or less decently, and I didn't want to do that.

The waiting game
So, like I said, somewhere early March I placed the order, and the estimated shipping date was mid-April. That gave me plenty of time to study the assembly manual and read user feedback. I found out some people had some trouble getting the frame all straight and perpendicular, but luckily this wasn't a problem that couldn't be fixed.
In the meantime, the shipping date moved forward a few times. The flu season hadn't spared the people at Prusa Research, and late April I finally got a shipping notification. Woo hoo!

The build process
I have documented my entire build in a series of YouTube videos. The entire assembly manual has nine chapters, so I made it a nine part video series. Also, this is the first time I'm actually talking in front of the camera, something I haven't done before (my other videos in wich I talk are all voice-overs). I'm not exactly the best public speaker, but I think I did a decent job without sounding too much like a blabbering idiot.

The entire build went pretty smooth. The mentioned problem with the frame geometry didn't happen to me. One this that worried me a little bit at first were the linear bearings on the Y-axis. During assembly, they were quite noisy, and I was worries I had over tightened the screws to hold them in place. Nothing that was beyond fixing, but if I indeed damaged them it would mean ordering new bearings and waiting some more. Luckily, during printing the noise is gone. I managed to damage one part, though. When I tried to snap the spool holder in place, the bottom part that snaps around the aluminium frame broke, and it doesn't properly stay in place. Not a big issue, since I'm also building an enclosure with a separate spool holder anyway.

My experience so far
I've had the printer for a few months now. I've printed quite a bit, and here's what I've encountered so far.
First of all, 3D printing isn't plug and play. Sorry, it isn't. It often requires some experimenting and trial and error to get things right. I've already experienced a few jams that required me to disassemble the entire extruder, and I'm glad I bought the kit and not a preassembled printer.
I have also built and enclosure out of Ikea Lack tables, so I can print with ABS and HIPS. There are a few problems with this. First of all, Ikea Lack tables are very unstable; especially when printing small parts, where the extruder has to move back and forth rapidly, the entire enclosure shakes a lot. I managed to get this more or less under control my attaching some steel corner braces. Second, the printers jams easily inside an enclosure with the doors closed. Apparently, this has to do with the design of the extruder, it has insufficient cooling, wich causes something known as heat creep. I'm not gonna go into too much detail, but it's a bad thing.
Prusa has designed a new extruder body with improved cooling, so that's on my to do list: printing the new parts, and then rebuilding the extruder. Again, glad I bought the kit, because I basically have to take the entire extruder apart and reassemble it with the new parts.
Overall, I'm quite satisfied with the printer. I've had a few problems, but this also happens on printers that cost three, four times as much.

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Oogie Boogie dice

This is going to be a short and simple one. With this prop, I introduced my wife to foamsmithing. She was working on an Oogie Boogie costume, from Tim Burton's "The nightmare before Christmas", and wanted a pair of dice to go with it. In the movie, Oogie Boogie rolls dice with skulls on the faces. A perfect beginner project!

Materials

• 10mm EVA foam floor mats
• 2mm EVA foam sheets
• Contact cement
• Book binding glue
• Acrylic paints
• Satin varnish
• Hobby knife
• Band saw
• Dremel with sanding drum, grinding bits and cutting wheel

Making a cube
To make a cube, you could just stack together sheets of foam until you get the right thickness, but that would require a lot of foam, and if you're using floor mats with a texture, you'd need to sand it away. I didn't want to do that. Instead, I cut six squares for each cube (I made two) and bevelled the edges at 45°. This is done easily with a band saw; if you don't have a band saw, it could also be done with a bench sander or, but that's a bit trickier to get it right, a Dremel.
The squares were then glue together with contact cement. No need to sand away any texture, and a perfect cube!

The faces
This is where my wife stepped in. She had downloaded a template for the faces and traced them all on 2 mm thick foam sheets. Next, she cut them all out and glued them on the cubes.

The next was done by me again (she doesn't like to use power tools). With a grinding bit on my Dremel, I cut out the eyes and smoothed the edges and corners a bit. I also added some scratches and cuts with a cutting wheel. Of course, I forgot to take a photo of that, but you can see it in the next step.

Painting
This was, again, done by my wife. First, the dice were primed with book binding glue, and then got a dark red base coat. After it had dried, the eyes and scratches were painted black. Finally, the entire prop got a coat of sating varnish.

And here's us, with our costumes and the dice, of course, at Elf Fantasy Fair Haarzuilens. 

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