Reply To: Hobby weekender 22/03/2019 – Alright I guess we're doing the 2010's…

[blinky465 17028xp 3]

So I built me a 3d printer. The timing was quite fortuitous, as it’s a subject that the Beasties have been covering in recent days too. I started by printing (and failing) with my little Up!Mini printer, before being totally enamoured by the Ultimaker 2+ at the Eagle Lab in Brighton.

I don’t have £200 let alone £2,000 to throw at a 3d printer – but now I’d been bitten by the bug (yes, I know it’s slow and problematic and everything else, but the Ultimaker is such a robust machine you can throw some g-code at it, leave it running for a few hours and come back to some amazing scatter terrain).

In the end, I figured that since I’ve built my own CNC machines from scratch, and have played about with stepper motors and the like, there’d be no harm in trying to put together a 3d printer from a kit off eBay. I plumped for the Tronxy X3 model (with auto-bed leveling head). The whole kit (inc. frame, motors, electronics AND bed levelling sensor) cost £120 including delivery.

It took about six hours in total over a few nights to build. I’m still not entirely sure it’s 100% right.

But here’s a photo showing it printing it’s first calibration cube.

So far so good. Exciting times….