E-Bay Adventure

Hi Everyone

First off I would like to thank everyone who has gone before and contributed to this project!

I now have my repstrap moving in all three axis’s and figured it was time to start blogging about. Sort of the job is not done until the paperwork is!

I bit the bullet and ordered the electronic kits and stepper motors from the online store. My initial order was for the “Complete Arduino Electronics kit” and the Sanguino processor.

The original plan was to build the electronics first and then work on the mechanical. However the store was back logged on deliveries; so after reading a lot of blogs and forum entries I decided to follow NopHead’s example and start with a XY table.

So off to Evil-Bay I went!

Given the cost of a gold reprap kit I knew I could spend a fair amount of money and still have something that would give me a good quick start.

Since I am thinking of subtraction processes like milling a bit more robustness would be a great plus. (Great to see NopHead now has a mini mill, how long before he drives our solutions to be more universal? I personally can not wait.)

E-Bay search terms that I evolved to look for something usable are: xy stage, xy table, linear stage, linear slide and linear actuator.

Anyway after loosing a number of bids in the ball park of a Gold kit I managed to get an XY table and another slide to use for the Z axis for about $400.00 plus shipping.

Here’s the picture that enticed me as it already had the dust shields for milling.

From ExMrClean

After questions to the vendor the question that I posed was how many pins on the motor cable? The answer was four which I assumed was a stepper motor (opps more on this later)!

So I placed my order, contingent on the vendor throwing in the Z axis stage, which he accepted.