Saturday, 18 December 2010

101 Mendels

From March up until a week ago I have run my Mendel as close to 24/7 as I can and it has printed 101 Mendels, with a bit of help from HydraRaptor. During all that time I have been able to sell them as fast as I could print them but there has been a dip in demand running up to Christmas, so I stopped printing on Monday, having built up a small stock.

I have shipped parts to England, Scotland, Isle of Man, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Poland, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Tenerife, USA, Canada, Australia and Singapore.



It seems weird now to have a quiet house and not have to stay up until midnight every night to start the overnight build. It does mean that I have time to blog again though, and print things that are not Mendel parts.

I have been printing parts of a Milestag laser tag gun for a friend of mine. I recommended CoCreate to him and he has taken it and run with it. His first design is way more sophisticated that anything I have managed so far. It is a large device broken up into parts that just fit on my 200mm bed. Here is one of them: -



You can see the rest in Tony's blog http://funwithelectrons.blogspot.com/2010/12/milestag.html.

I think a machine printing 101 copies of itself must be a bit of a milestone in the RepRap project. That is about 100kg of plastic and not far off 4800 hours of printing in about 6000 available. It is testimony to the reliability of the mechanical design and if anything, the quality of the parts is getting better as I tweak the settings.
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14 comments:

  1. Unknown18 December 2010 at 19:50

    That looks like its come out of a comercial 3D printer excelent work.. !!

    I will definatly be re-trying my 0.3mm home made welding tip out again now with my FABLAB printed wades extruder instead of the wormdrive extruder. I think I have sorted out a way to fit one of the glass heated beds I made last year.

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  2. RichRap3D18 December 2010 at 20:18

    That is quite an achievement, both the 100+ mendels and the printed Laser gun case! it looks perfect.

    Seriously, you deserve a medal for services to RepRap, I would print you one, but It wouldn't be that impressive.

    I spotted the lower price (Christmas sale?) plastic's - very tempted...
    Have a great Christmas.

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  3. nophead18 December 2010 at 22:14

    No it's not a price reduction for Christmas. I just am just following the downwards trend to remain competitive as sales had dried up. You can get them slightly cheaper here: http://emakershop.com/browse.php?listing=15 because there are no eBay fees.

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  4. Woodsmoke20 December 2010 at 12:47

    Way to go nophead! 100 Mendel printed parts sets at 175 quid each odd. Was planning to get up and running a while back, when you sent me mine. Then recoup my costs some selling parts myself. But I'm still waiting on the rest of the mendel from Camiel haha. Don't think I'm cut out to be a business man.

    Nice work.

    Woodsmoke

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  5. Bob Morrison20 December 2010 at 14:42

    Congratulations on reaching a milestone that few will ever reach. And although your blog hasn't been as active lately thanks for your detailed reports, analysis, insights and experiments. The fact that many of your ideas are integrated into the designs of others is as good a testimonial as anyone can get. Keep up the great work - and of course Merry Christmas!

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  6. Forrest Higgs28 December 2010 at 19:25

    LOL! As usual, Chris, you're streets ahead of the rest of us. I'd wondered why you'd been so quiet for so long. I guess I know why, now. ;-)

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  7. d1plo1d29 December 2010 at 00:57

    Congrats Nophead! That is one dam impressive uptime.

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  8. Unknown3 January 2011 at 10:16

    102 (might be more now ;-) and you can add New Zealand to your list of countries.

    Congratz

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  9. nophead3 January 2011 at 10:58

    108 built and 104 sold now,thank you. Always good to add new countries to the list. Also added Wales last week.

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  10. Anonymous3 January 2011 at 18:37

    So just a quick question: rather than stay up late, why didn't you just build a second printer and run both in parallel for half a day, so that you could go to bed early and/or have more free time?

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  11. nophead3 January 2011 at 22:35

    I don't have enough space left in my room to afford an extra machine just to be able to run the first one less.

    Also I keep expecting the market to disappear as every time I sell one that is another potential competitor. The odd thing is that there now must be about 3000 people with Mendels, Makerbots and RapMans but less than about a dozen selling parts.

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  12. Grogyan4 January 2011 at 18:04

    You missed out New Zealand on your list of countries ;-)

    My parts should be here any day now as the holiday season is over, which means the postal service is back on today.

    That should be 102, or where ever I am in your huge number of sets that have been sent out.

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  13. nophead4 January 2011 at 18:17

    Grogyan,
    Your parts were 99 but you bought them after this post. I will update the chart periodically and add it to the lineage page.

    The chart has only 94 sales on it.

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  14. k2000forsale1 June 2011 at 22:53

    Im looking into the mendel come all the other types. So far I am not impressed with the quality of the objects. How did you get yours so wonderfully precise... yet the rest of the mere mortals suck at it...

    DO you provide a guide or better components in a kit form.. including electronics and all the gubbings for printing at the same quality above in the image..

    Please respond as I really am after a decent reprap clone that actually works well...

    Thanks

    ReplyDelete

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