Ever since hearing about them back in college, I wanted one.
So now that the reprap projects have been around for a little while, it seemed time to give it a shot.
I ordered a bunch of stuff off ebay, after it arrived, started the build. Here's the things I came across.
1) If you buy a partial kit and then try to piece stuff together, you're bound to be missing something. A mounting plate for the extruder and a thermistor for the heated bed are my missing items.
2) Note that there are varying designs that are all Prusa Mendel 2's. In my case, I had ordered threaded rods for one type, and needed other length rods. Getting those in metric wasn't quite so easy in the US.
3) Certain types of flux are no good for soldering and can cause shorts. As a result, my sanguinololu kit had a few shorts which caused some problems. One of which led me to let the magic smoke out of a stepper driver or two.
4) Stepper driver boards are also varying in quality. I initially bought a set of 5 from a vendor in China. At least two of them had bad board edges where soldering the legs on would risk shorting the leg to other traces on the edge of the board. That was a bit of a mess to clean up. Using a knife to cut those traces away worked out though.
5) A second order of a prebuilt sanguinololu turned out to have problems too. During their manufacturing, the Y-Step and Y-Dir lines were shorted. So the Y-axis wouldn't move.
6) You really should get glass for the heated bed. The bed is usually warped, so that can't possibly work well.
Posted by hachu at April 11, 2013 12:24 PM