The box arrives, the adventure begins

Today, the box arrived. Actually it arrived yesterday, but the Postal Service couldn't leave it at the door. A friend of mine was good enough to pick it up for me while I was at work today (thanks dude!) It was waiting for me when I got home.

The first thing I noticed was a large tear along one edge. I am going to trust that nothing is damaged.

I opened the box and found a nice letter from the MakerGear folks with some information about the kit as well as the parts manifest. I carefully unpacked the various bags of parts and made a quick visual scan. It looks like everything is there. I also have some 3 mm black ABS plastic when I get it all together and am ready for printing.

In addition to all the parts they included samples of 3 mm and 1.75 mm glow-in-the-dark ABS plastic. Even better, they threw in a small Ghirardelli chocolate. :-)

I've started a Flickr set and will be adding to it as the build proceeds.

Let the adventure begin!

The parts have been shipped!

I received an e-mail from the folks at MakerGear this afternoon that the Prusa Mendel Kit has been shipped. Woohoo!

It should be on it's way to me through the auspices of the United States Postal Service. I expect it should be here by next Friday at the latest.

Parts - They are a thing of beauty

The folks over at MakerGear posted some photos of the parts in the Prusa Mendel Kit. It is great to see what I'll be getting, and hopefully they will be shipping the kits soon.

Looking at the photos this looks a little daunting. But I think I'm up to building it. It looks like a large chunk of it is the nuts, bolts, and misc. small parts. Looking at pictures of the Prusa Mendel people have posted online it doesn't look that complicated.

Howdy World!

Howdy World!

As is usual in the software development world, the first step in learning a new language is to create a 'Hello World' program that simply prints out 'Hello World'. This isn't exactly analogous but it is the start of a new project for me so it seems appropriate.

Back in Feb. 2010 I came across the RepRap Project, most likely from a post on the Makezine blog. I tweeted about it, with a goal in mind of printing out a near infinite supply of Legos (the Coolest Toy Ever!).

I've been procrastinating terribly on starting the project. I'm not entirely sure I have the skills to build such a thing, and get it too successfully print once I do. But after talking about it to everyone I know for the last year I finally decided to take the plunge.

On January 7, 2011 I put in a pre-order for the next batch of Hybrid Prusa Mendel kits from the folks over at MakerGear. They should be shipping out towards the end of January.

I intend to use this blog to detail the build, any problems I encounter, and hopefully solutions to the problems that arise.

Here's looking forward to an exciting, successful project!