After being a MendelMax man for quite some time, I've decided to build my first Prusa i3 and could use a bit of guidance.
When I built my Prusa 2, the process went really smoothly. When I built all my MendelMaxes, the process went smoothly. But unfortunately I'm having quite a few issues getting my i3 assembled. The design... well... just seems kind of half-baked. A lot of the standard parts have been problematic for me, such as the Y-carriage belt holder, the X-ends, the X-carriage, the extruder... There are a ton of 3rd party parts that people seem to be designing and posting to Thingiverse, many of which differ very significantly from the originals. The extruder and X-carriage in particular have probably like 20 redesigns out there!
The lack of bracing on the lasercut frame seems really problematic and securing it with M10 rods and fender washers seems very inelegant. I like the braced frame styles but by now there are three of those and they're each ever so slightly different...
It doesn't seem like there's a ton of development activity going on in Josef Prusa's github repo and most of the recent work I see has been done to the box_frame style. Is the lasercut style dead in favor of the box_frame style or something?
It sort of seems like what's needed is a released design that's "good enough" that people can improve on. The unclear development, unfinished-seeming parts, and overall fragmentation are really confusing me. Once I'm done with my modifications and I have a machine whose parts all works really well together, I plan to release them but of course that just adds to the problem of fragmentation...
Has anyone else had difficulty getting it all to work together? What have others done? Purchased full kits that they know will work well? Resigned themselves to replacing half the printed parts with different ones when the default ones don't work out?
When I built my Prusa 2, the process went really smoothly. When I built all my MendelMaxes, the process went smoothly. But unfortunately I'm having quite a few issues getting my i3 assembled. The design... well... just seems kind of half-baked. A lot of the standard parts have been problematic for me, such as the Y-carriage belt holder, the X-ends, the X-carriage, the extruder... There are a ton of 3rd party parts that people seem to be designing and posting to Thingiverse, many of which differ very significantly from the originals. The extruder and X-carriage in particular have probably like 20 redesigns out there!
The lack of bracing on the lasercut frame seems really problematic and securing it with M10 rods and fender washers seems very inelegant. I like the braced frame styles but by now there are three of those and they're each ever so slightly different...
It doesn't seem like there's a ton of development activity going on in Josef Prusa's github repo and most of the recent work I see has been done to the box_frame style. Is the lasercut style dead in favor of the box_frame style or something?
It sort of seems like what's needed is a released design that's "good enough" that people can improve on. The unclear development, unfinished-seeming parts, and overall fragmentation are really confusing me. Once I'm done with my modifications and I have a machine whose parts all works really well together, I plan to release them but of course that just adds to the problem of fragmentation...
Has anyone else had difficulty getting it all to work together? What have others done? Purchased full kits that they know will work well? Resigned themselves to replacing half the printed parts with different ones when the default ones don't work out?