Build Date: March 2012
Location: Mumbai, India

Surprisingly, most of the parts one would need to build a functional 3D printer are readily available in Mumbai. You just need to know where to look. All of the electronics was bought at lamington road. The mechanical parts were hunted down in lohar chawl, malad/goregaon areas and few of them were found in scrap.

A 3D rendering:

The actual chassis was laser cut out of MDF instead of acrylic/ABS to save cost.

The electronics are kinda pre-historic. It was all I had available at the time. L298 and L297 are used as stepper motor driver/controller, a custom  Arduino-ATMega 328 clone (with Teacup Firmware)  is used as the brains while the PIC 18F micro acts as a USB-Serial convertor.

Extruder:

I think the extruder was probably the hardest thing to design and get right. The print quality is heavily dependent on this one component alone. So, I really wanted to buy an off the shelf solution and get done with it. But, as always, I could not resist the temptation of trying to build one from scratch.

My design is based on this idea. I got it right in about three attempts. You can build one with simple hand tools.

With a 0.9mm nozzle size, I wasn’t expecting much. But with some fine tuning, I was able to achieve some very promising results.

The first cube, well, wasn’t a cube :)

The classic whistle works but came out with a gap in-between due to a missed step on the belt drive.

 

 

Heated Bed: