MakerSlide based Ceramic Delta 3D Printer

[Unfold]

Hi all,

First a short introduction since this is my first post here. Since 2009 I have been working on printing with ceramic clay materials at our design studio Unfold (read my article about paste extruder development in the latest [url]reprapmagazine.com[/url]). We’ve developed a couple of museum installations featuring ceramic 3d printing and use several printers in our studio to print ceramics, check our website unfold.be to find out more.
Since day one we’ve been using Bits from Bytes Rapman machines. Besides being the only kit machines available when we started, they offer various benefits for our purpose unmatched by more recent machines. With its 20x20x20cm build volume, its large and since ceramics shrink when firing (you lose 15-20%) you want to have that big build volume. But the most important factor is that it is a 1st gen RepRap Darwin derivative in which the bed moves only in the Z axis. Since the printed object is made of plastic clay that air dries over a prolonged period, it stays more or less flexible during the whole print. Moving this object back and forth like on Mendel or early Makerbot machines doesn’t do it any good. It can collapse easily.

Now for several reasons I am looking into moving away from Rapman, first of all they are discontinued by BFB and are becoming dated (only Skeinforge can still generate non-5D Gcode). And we want to be able to print bigger.
Originally I dismissed the idea of building a delta whose main benefit (as far as I understand) is speed, something I don’t need, and I was afraid the carriage was not able to carry much weight. But recently my friend Jonathan Keep proved me wrong by building a delta for his own ceramic printing. After looking into delta again, I decided that the simpler build, and non-moving platform were worth giving it a shot. Now I am looking for some support in choosing a design to start from. I am not the man to develop stuff from scratch and spend countless hours on it since I rather focus on the stuff you can print with it. So I am looking for a design that is rather well documented with all parts available as STL and that is flexible so I can modify it to my needs. I am deffenitly comfortable with changing a lot to the design but would love to start with something already fairly established. For the record, I will document everything for others to replicate again.

Here is my wish list and my questions:

-MakerSlide: I have a bunch of 1000mm MakerSlides that I want to base this machine on. They were kindly sponsored by Inventables and look great! The other beams preferably standard extruded alu profile. So basically I am looking for a MakerSlide based design which narrows my choices. What is the best documented/supported/thought-out MakerSilde based design out there at the moment? I have researched a bit and Wolfstock and Rostock seem to be well documented. I have acces to lasercutter and 3d printer.
-Motors on top: I want to move all motors to the top since clay can be messy and dusty (should be fairly simple)
-Sturdy carriage and arms: The carriage should be very sturdy and able to move some load. Our most basic extruders move the build material (an 8oz cartridge with clay) on the carriage so it should be stable and study. I was skeptical about this but Jonathan does fine (although with a much smaller machine). What arms are best suited/sturdiest?
-BIG Buildvolume: around 40cm diameter and 50 cm height. I will keep all makerslides at their original length.
-I do have a question in regards to the build volume. I have been playing around with the Delta Calculator (http://www.thinkyhead.com/_delta/) and it seems that this build volume is easily achievable when moving the carriage to the extremes. But when looking at exciting delta’s I noticed that their build plate is often a LOT smaller than what is available. Why is this? The only reason I could find is that if you max out your build volume your print might not be able to be removed due to it not fitting through the vertical posts. Is that correct? If so, has anyone attempted to design a delta were one post could be removed in order to remove the printed object?

I think thats all, more questions will sure follow

Thanks in advance for all your input!
Dries/unfold

ps. cross posted to some several places.

[Enraged]

Have you read this? http://www.buildlog.net/blog/2013/04/th ... d-printer/

[Unfold]

Have you read this? http://www.buildlog.net/blog/2013/04/th ... d-printer/

Looked at the design but did not read the whole thread. The design is fairly opposite of what I need, the quantum has a bed that moves in all axis and build volume is very small. Doesn't look like the best starting point imho. Or am I missing something from the thread?

[Jacques]

Maybe this helps?
http://buildlog.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=1783&hilit=delta

[Unfold]

Thanks Jacques,
I did go through all of those a while ago but it's easy to not see the forest for the trees I was hoping some people with Makerslide delta experience could chime in and tackle some of my questions.

Maybe this helps?
http://buildlog.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=1783&hilit=delta

[Unfold]

Based on input from Delta google group, I am going for building a customized Wolfstock. The first parts to test one vertical are printing as we speak.
The Delta ORD bot seemed like another good place to start but is not documented as well as the Wolfstock. Wolfstock also has all its printed parts designed in OpenSCAD so very customizable.

Will keep you posted.