Time for a quick update on my RepRap build, Leonard. Some of my part orders arrived at the weekend (kudos to thingfarm.org for great customer service) so today I finally started on assembling the frame and was pleasantly surprised at how fast everything went together. Utilising the Prusa build guide available at reprap.org I managed to get the basic structure put together in around an hour.

Everything now needs tightening and squaring up, but I’m more than happy with progress so far.

The only real issue that I have had is need to develop a custom pulley to facilitate a T2.5 belt (I should have ordered the T5 to fit the downloaded pulley .stl). In future I aim to swap these over to metal solutions but for now the home solution is fine.

The photo shows the original pulley and the one I developed. You can get the .stl for the T2.5 pulley and/or sprocket here.

Fig 1: Prusa pully gears

One impact that this did have on the build was that I did not need to add the additional spacer washers to line up the guide wheel with the motor pulley as the home one is much shorter in length. More info on this can be found detailed in the reprap.org build instructions.

From reading the build instructions it looks like that some of my plastics (x carriage support mounts) will need to be drilled in places. I wont know for shore until I get onto that part of the build as I cannot make it out.

Hopefully I’ll get the frame squared up and get onto the x-carriage tomorrow. More updates as things progress 🙂

Just for ref: there is a great printable Prusa Mendel build guide put together by Gary Hodgson avaliable here.