About the blog

I built my first printer, a Prusa MK3S, last summer, from a kit. It's performed flawlessly so far, so it's been a great way for me to learn a few things about how printing is supposed to work.  After several months, I decided that I wanted to get more into the nuts and bolts and source code of everything that's going on with 3d printers in general, so I bought a used clone printer to learn with. The printer was a train wreck, and needed a lot of attention. So I started taking it apart, and figuring out how to make it better where I can. The next step will be to get into source code and controllers and so forth, but for now, I'm building a printer that looks the way I want it to.

In researching the various ways that people have approached printing, I read a lot from reprap.org. 

As much as I love the RepRap movement, I think the ground has shifted since its inception. At the time, as I understand it, early adventures in 3D printing were very much a home-brewed affair, and the idea behind reprap was that the founders very much wanted to make sure that people could find designs that were buildable with whatever they had on hand, like threaded rods, zip ties, some plywood, and so on. But at this stage, there are so many clones, and parts available on eBay and AliExpress... that finding parts isn't as hard as it used to be. I've talked to several people who are gifted designers, but not so mechanically savvy. The issue for them isn't finding parts, it's finding understanding, know-how, and descriptions of good practice. For example, adding loctite to your belt pulleys and motor mounting screws.

I bought a couple of i3 clones, and I figured I'd start taking them apart and rebuilding them. And as I dug in, I realized that this was an opportunity to make a few decisions about replacement parts... and explain the build. There are plenty of instruction sets online, and I found them to be helpful, but some folks seem to still think that the process is just out of their comfort zone. And, speaking frankly, having seen what I saw, pulling apart the RepRap Guru printer, it was pretty clear that some decisions were made along the way that just didn't work out well for the person doing the assembly. 

Intially, I just wanted to rebuild the existing RRG printer, but as I went about it, I found too many issues that were just too hard to ignore. So I had to throw out that original premise, and just started fixing the problems that I saw, as I went. 

So, I decided to put together a blog that detailed my build process, how I approach problems, what decisions I made with upgrades, and why, in the hopes that this narrative will prove helpful to others, who are trying to make a 3d printer that they're happy with, but lack the mechanical savvy.

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Because there is a 3d printer project out of Spain with a similar name, I feel compelled to state up front that this project and that project are in no way related. (Other than that they're both variations on the Prusa i3 design.) There's also a Hephaestus project in the EU that has to do with using robots in construction. This blog isn't about that, either.

The name is a bit hyperbolic, I'll admit. Hephaestus was tossed out of Olympus for being lame, and then was helped, and taught to become the technologist and smith that earned him his fame. These printers are junk. In all honesty, the final products will probably look nothing like they do at the moment, and they may not even have any of the original parts by the time I'm done. We'll see.