Following a long period of storage (being relegated to the garage), my Prusa i3 copy was not doing so well, several of the printed parts were failing, or close to failing and needed to be replaced.
A work colleague had asked me to print a couple of vesa mounts for some HP screens, so I glued some of the parts back together and printed enough replacements to get the printer working again.
I was then able to print him 2 of the the vesa mounts.
The above picture is not actually my print, but one from Thingiverse, I forgot to take any photos of my prints, but they looked exactly the same and were also printed in white filament.
Whilst attempting to print an enclosure for my Division Controller electronics, the printer failed again and I was by now really struggling with the fact that the Y axis was bent and I could not get the bed level enough for a large print.
I decided it was time for an upgrade to something a bit more substantial and had settled on an Ord Bot Hadron the big brother of the Quantum as designed by Bart Dring from Buildlog.net, the same designer as my CO2 Laser.
The above is one of the cleanest builds I could find that holds true to the original design, this is from Oliver’s Blog.
I still have a bunch of Makerslide left over from my CO2 Laser build so thought this would be a good way to go – Bart claimed on his blog that the Quantum was stiff enough that he could stand on it!
I won an auction on Ebay for a set of 1/8″ (3.175mm) powder coated aluminium plates for $50.00 (£38.36) which even with the $17.26 shipping and $17.00 customs charges (total UK landed cost £65.40) is still a fraction of the cost of buying the parts from elsewhere.
Another Ebay seller wanted upwards of $110.00 (£85.00) for fewer plates, reprapdiscount want $499.00 (£385.73) for the complete frame without electronics! Other Ebay sellers are asking around £250.00 for a similar frame without electronics.
I could probably machine the parts from plate, but would still struggle to meet this price if I thought about any kind of price for my time.
I also won an auction for an ATmega2560, Ramps 1.4, 5 x A4988 stepper drivers and a 12864 graphics based controller and interface all for £17.94 ($23.20) with free shipping, to use for the electronics.
I have not given up on Sanguinololu based builds, I still intend to use one on my Kossel Mini, but I fancy the idea of dual extruders at some point and this price was just too good to pass up, plus the mounting holes already exist on the handle plate of the Hadron for an atMega2560 board.