Walking around the 2019 Midwest Rep-Rap Festival, I saw a lot of creative 3D printer ideas. One that I saw that I really liked was the Udder One, a 3D printer built around a milk crate
And that got me thinking: what other odd, vaguely rectangular things could hold a 3D printer? Or rather, what sort of novelty frames could someone build around a relatively decent 3D printer, and still have it make sense and look cool?
Well…..what about a Benchy?
A Rep-Rap i3-like printer more or less needs two uprights and a flat printbed that travels in the Y direction. Looking at the Benchy model, you could use the back side of the ‘wheelhouse’ to hold the uprights, and the printbed could move forward and backwards in and out of the wheelhouse.
So, what if I do just that, and build a 3D printer into a benchy? Seems like a neat challenge, if anything I get a halfway decent 3D printer out of it, and if it works a great conversation piece. I told my friends about this idea, and we agreed that we want to have it ready for the East Coast RepRap Festival on October 12-13 of 2019. They’ve also volunteered a handful of Prusas to help print parts, which is awesome. So with it being basically June 2019, I guess I should get going on it.
At first I thought I was going to tackle the size of the internal printer and start building the benchy around it. But the first hurdle I ran into ended up very much defining the size for me: the heated print bed
PART 1 HERE: https://happylittlepcbs.net/benchybot-part-1-heated-print-bed-sense-of-scale/