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Showing posts from 2016

What to Do With a Stack of Picture Frames?

When You Have Too Much Free Stuff! Our newest member Raul got his hands on a stack of about 40 picture frames that were being junked. On a general note Freeside tends to discourage large piles of objects randomly appearing as it tends to collect in corners. Raul got permission from our projects team with a time limit of a few weeks. In this case unnecessary, as the membership more or less attacked the pile of boxes and rapidly rendered them into things. Unfortunately starting off all the frames looked something like this: Not terribly useful. We don't even have any idea who these guys are. After a few passes through the planer, however, we get something like this: A perfectly good picture frame useful for stuff. First idea was to push a couple of these through a the laser cutter. Concept good, aim.... Aim was a little off. Also we had just rebuilt the laser computer and electronics so there were a couple of kinks to work out in CamBam's post processor: &nbsp

Rebuilding The Kraken

"The Kraken" is one of Freeside's 3D printers, designed and built by a former member. It is the light blue printer sitting off to the side on most photos of our 3D printing zone - sadly, the machine has never printed quite right and it's been down for repairs more often than it's been usable. It's design had some major flaws, particularly in the frame that was fairly unstable. When it did print it would make great looking parts, but the bed leveling was fickle and imprecise. With the AO-100 and more recently the Mini, there wasn't a lot of reason for our members to use it. So I decided to rectify that and rebuild it completely from the ground up into a RepRap "Wilson", a popular design reworked from the Prusa i3. I chose this particular build because there are a lot of information available and a great set of info and instructions on both the RepRap wiki page about it, and the github page for the parts. It's a well known RepRap and has been