For A Few Hundred Bucks, You Can Make Your Own 3-D Printer

[EC]

Winter project!!!!!

Via NPR: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/11/08/243951594/for-a-few-hundred-bucks-you-can-make-your-own-3-d-printer

You can print out almost anything with a 3-D printer, from and to and . You can buy a 3-D printer. But what if you wanted to make one yourself? Can the average Joe (or Jess) do it, without a background in electronics?

With a few hundred dollars and a couple of days, yes.

The adventurous and tech-savvy can cobble them together from scratch — did with Legos and a hot glue gun, and with electronics he found in a Nigerian scrap yard.

For the less geeky, with deeper pockets, there are that go for about $1,000 minimum. Or, you can get a and assemble one Ikea-style, bringing the price down to as low as $200.

That's what did. The whole thing — including printing a plastic whistle — took about 12 hours. Not bad.
Some 3-D Printing Terms, In Normal Speak:

Here's how it works: There are two parts to any 3-D printer: the hardware and the software. The hardware is the thing you actually build — the box-like structure with parts that squeeze out along three axes. The software is the stuff that tells the printer what shape to make and how to do it.

"What you're really doing is, you're building a robot that can accurately position itself in three-dimensional space ... like a robot hot glue gun," explains Sean Ragan, who made an for Make magazine.

First, you build the basic scaffolding, which some people manage to laser cut from plywood. You screw on the other parts. Like any appliance, there's a power source to plug into the wall. A few small motors drive the extruder (the part that squishes out hot plastic), and a stack of circuit boards tells the parts where to move.

There are all over the Web to help in the step-by-step process, which tends to take somewhere between eight and 16 hours.

More at link.

For some reason the links to relevent pages have not shown up in the quote.