Okay, it might not be the most beautiful plastic melting robot out there, but it is far from finished and it’s beautiful to me. And yes, by plastic melting robot I am talking about my new Velleman K8200 3D Printer. This 3D printer is a kit that you have to assemble piece by piece, wire up, solder, and calibrate all by yourself. While this may seem like a pain (and boy it was), there are many reasons I wanted to build a 3D Printer from the ground up. This is supposedly the most ‘hackable’ (modifiable?) 3D Printer on the market. I didn’t want to just have my own 3D Printer – I wanted to know it, not just know how to use it. I was originally going to document my entire process from unboxing to the first print. I had a GoPro setup for a time-lapse and Google Glass to record a first person view of assembly, but ran into multiple issues so here is a brief summary of my first impressions of the Velleman K8200 3D Printer.

Some Assembly Required.

This is what a 3D Printer looks like. Over 40 bags of nuts, bolts, screws, bolts, bearings, wires, rods, and plastic parts. I must say the instructions were quite thorough, however there were some parts that I would have changed to make assembly slightly easier. It also didn’t help that this was the only thing I had for a workbench. I would definitely recommend an island workbench so you can work at it from all sides.

Some people have claimed to build the entire printer in 8 hours while others claimed it took them a month. I didn’t track hours, but I finished mine in about 3 days. The x-carriage (above) took the longest, but that was because I was trying to record everything with Google Glass which died every 15 minutes. Maybe next time.

If there was anything this project taught me it was patience. If you’re not a serious tinkerer or DIYer or have a low tolerance for patience – this printer may not be for you. There were a lot of things I could have done that would have made this build easier. For instance – I didn’t have any wrenches (besides an allen wrench). I used a pliers to hold all the nuts in place. Get a wrench set! Some of the nuts are quite small and my local hardware store didn’t have the correct sizes so you may need to go online to purchase a complete set.

First Print

The z-axis appears to be too close to the bed and the layers seem to be progressively getting off-centered. For assembling this all by hand, I’m quite surprised to have it actually (kind of) print something with only minor issues. When I finally finished and plugged it in the first thing I noticed was there was no visual indication that it was on. When I plugged in the USB cable a few lights flickered on the controller board and when I plugged in the power a green light flashed twice and then faded. I immediately thought this was a power failure and I had blown the controller board. Turns out – that’s what it’s supposed to do! I opened Repetier and connected the printer. The X and Z axises worked just fine. I could hear the Y motor turning but the bed wasn’t moving. With closer inspection I noticed the pulley on the motor was lose. Easy fix. Bed heated up just fine. So far so good. Now for the extruder – nothing. Using my multimeter I checked to see if the extruder was getting any power. It wasn’t. Going through the wires I noticed I had mixed up a red and orange wire. I will say this – don’t heat shrink your wires until after you test all the connections.

Conclusion

I’m still a long way away from getting nice prints out of this machine, but overall I’m quite happy with it.