Any Interest in Mendel Parts?

Hello Everyone,

This is my first post here, but I’ve been talking to some folks in #reprap and working on my MakerBot since late February. My MakerBot is up and running, but I’ve been turning my attention towards the Mendel lately since it seems to be a rather more capable machine with a much larger print surface to boot.

I’m met with the same problem most of you have in that I cannot find any readily available Mendel pieces outside of the standard hardware to simply purchase a set of parts for myself and avoid the long print times. I’ve printed a few Mendel pieces on my MakerBot, but don’t particularly relish the idea of 60 hours of monitoring the printing, and would also prefer to have a machine built from higher quality materials and with a better fit and finish than what the MakerBot can provide.

I come from a manufacturing background and have been looking at various ways to get a nice set of parts produced at a reasonable price. As I’m sure most of you have found, the cost of producing a one-off set of parts is exceedingly high and not worth the price. What I think might be a reasonable option would be to get a nice, high quality set of master parts fabricated, and then make some molds to make some nice castings out of a high strength, temperature resistant plastic.

I’ve given a good look at the Mendel STLs and the parts I’ve printed, and am confident in their moldability. The only drawback to these parts is that the end-user would have to drill out some of the holes themselves – the parts have holes in all three reference planes and making a mold to capture those features would be difficult at best. Divots would be cast into the pieces to facilitate easier drilling. Outside of a few holes being drilled, they’d be ready for final assembly and would certainly beat spending 60 hours per parts set printing.

Would this be something that anyone here is interested in? Pricing looks like it would be in the $200-250 range; If there’s sufficient interest I’ll hammer out all the details and get to work on making the project a reality.

I realize that on these forums I’m new, but I’ve been producing products for the past five years as a manufacturer of LED Flashlights; My site is located at [www.muyshondt.net]. Lately my projects have focused away from lighting and into more general electronics, and I’m hoping to be able to get more involved with 3D printing tech as things move forward.

If you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to ask.

All the best,

Enrique

Enrique, if you poke around in this forum and in here,
You'll see that there is quite a bit of demand for this.

[dev.forums.reprap.org]

Also, do you have a local RepRap Users Group?
[forums.reprap.org]