We received our Thing-o-Matic last week but only started to assemble it last Wednesday, it took me two days to assemble.
Nothing really hard to assemble, only the solders where there is a need of extra careful, Check some photos below.
There is some things that are not in the manual that you have to take in consideration like wash your hands time to time, otherwise the machine will start to be black from the ash deposited in the wood laser cuts.
You need to sand some wood and acrylic, buy one sheet of 240 and another of 120 sand paper.
Get SuperGlue in the nearest shop and some high temperature soldering, like this one that melts at 227º (Celsius), the extruder heats up to 220º so you need a solder that melts over that temperature. If you have a better one just use it.
Sand the edges of the wood that will be on the exterior so the machine will have a nice and cleaner look.
DO NOT force the acrylic parts otherwise they will be broken, just sand the joins first so it will fit nice without lot of pressure.
It took me two days, in the first day I just built the Automated build everithing except the extruder (I forgot to buy the super glue) and the electronics, in the second day I took all morning just to assemble the extruder and after lunch just assembled the electronics and put all together so in hours was like:
Day 1: 9:30AM to 1PM and 2PM to 6PM
Day 2: 9:30AM to 1PM and 2PM to 5PM
Totaling 14hours of work
This is without the adjustments needed to print perfect objects (maybe more 3 or 4 hours).
So the assembling process, I started to take some photos, but then realized that were the same photos that are in the Thing-o-Matic assembling page so went straight to assembling.
Here are all parts (except for the wood) needed to build the Automatic Build Platform
After soldering the wire to the motor
Gluing the Aluminium sheet to the platform
The platform base assembled (after this just wash your hands
)
Platform already assembled
Putting the rods on the machine
How it look like with the platform inside
SAND the acrylic!!
The first extrusion
The first printed blocks
There is also a movie, it's processing and will be here today
Statistics: Posted by robosavvy — Fri Feb 25, 2011 1:41 pm
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