RepRap-tastic

In the pursuit of print speed, I have decided to upgrade my stepper motors. My current ones are four Mercury Motor SM-42BYG011-25's. They are pretty nice motors, though they feel very underpowered. With 1/16 microstepping, the best I could do was a whisker under 100mm/s; when extruding, barely 40mm/s. About as cute as they are pathetic for the job, I'm afraid. So, I decided to grab some upgraded Wantai 42BYGHM809's from my favourite local gadgetry shop, nicegear.co.nz . Hadley stocks all manner of Sparkfun electronics, but at prices that make them affordable to us here in good old New Zealand, especially considering that shipping is free on orders above a certain amount (which I cannot for the life of me remember what it is). When I got the motors, my first thought was, "wow, these are heavy." Shown here on my workshop bench, ready to have their shafts filed. Don't worry, most  of the gunk on the workbench is actually its normal color. After ...

I started getting a little fed-up with the low Z clearance on Adrian's geared extruder design  due to the rather large drive gear hitting the rails on very wide prints, so I decided to take the plunge to running a Bowden extruder. My goal was to not modify the original extruder or hotend in any way, in case the Bowden cable or its couplings failed and I needed to revert to the previous extruder setup. Shown here, in working order. The first hurdle faced was to acquire the PTFE tube that was to be used as a Bowden extruder, but that was going to prove difficult. At a total of something like 50 Euro all-up shipped in from the UK, I was wondering if it would perhaps be cheaper to just build a bigger RepRap... However, the brilliant Vik Olliver (who does both the best price and best service for PLA and ABS filament over here in New Zealand through his company, Diamond Age Solutions ) suggested to use PVC irrigation tubing from the local hardware store. This seemed like a great...

So, ever since a colleage got an original Parrot AR.Drone back in 2010 (and it flew away on its own due to a software error, never to be heard from again - gutted), I have been wanting to build a tricopter of my own. However, with limited resources, this sort of thing does tend to take a while. In terms of RC planes, as those if you in the know may know already, there are many varieties, ranging from anywhere from a single rotor up to eight individual rotors, and sometimes even more. As far as these go, quadrocopters  are generally the most popular. However, I wanted something unique and interesting. I toyed for a long time on a twin-rotor thrust vectored design, but eventually settled on the idea of a tricopter. However, back in 2010 I did not have the tools required to build one from scratch, and buying one kind of ruins the fun, so the project stopped there. Plus, I couldn't figure out how to mount the swivelling tail motor. In any case, 2 years pass, and enter the RepR...