3D Printer Numero Tres

A lot of my friends thought I was insane to try to build a RepRap from scratch, without a kit, with no experience, and with mostly 3D printed parts of my own design.  And they might have been right in some ways.  I'm at the point where I just need to solder a few last wires and the physical mechanical parts of the printer will be done. Then all I have to do is load the firmware and fire it up, configure and reconfigure the firmware, work out all the little mechanical kinks, and so forth, and I should be ready for my first print.

But, what I realized is I didn't really know how to do any of those things, and I was starting to get more and more 3D Hubs orders coming in, so I needed another printer, and I needed it now.  Enter the Geeetech Rostock GS2 Pro.  I picked up this cheap Rostock kit, with dual extruders and heated bed, for under 300 bucks.  Its got a larger build volume, roughly 170mm x 200mm.  Thats almost twice as big as the Up.

Its an open source Delta RepRap design, using the Repetier-Host software, and Slic3r for the slicing engine.  The firmware is Marlin, so configuration and set-up will be very similar to the big printer.

It took me a full Saturday and half of a Sunday to build it.  Everything went really smoothly with the step by step pdf AND YouTube instructions.  My only complaint is THE GUY IN THE YOUTUBE VIDEOS NEEDS TO MOVE HIS HAND OUT OF THE WAY or change the camera angle, so we can see what he's doing!

I spent another couple of days here and there tinkering with the firmware, fiddling with values I shouldn't and then spending hours trying to figure out what the heck is wrong, before I had it reasonably dialed in.  But I've got a fair amount of experience now compiling and loading the firmware and what all the various settings are, as well as using Slic3r and Repetier-Host.

Only now am I truly ready to conquer the Godzilla printer.