The build Begins

Hi I've been lurking on the reprap forums and site since early 2007 and for a host of reasons haven't been able to get a build going. Moving to Canada from Ireland, sucking at soldering, living in a small apartment and not wanting to pollute my long suffering girlfriend with fumes all played a part.

Well last week I met up with Wade Bortz, the first guy to sell a completely repraped set of parts, for a case of beer (typical Canadians). He's workshop happens to be a block away from where we live and he's kindly offered to share his workspace and guide me down the pearlious path of building a reprap.

So this Saturday I got a start on soldering the electronics. Wade has kindly let me use a spare set of electronics that he had while I'm waiting for Zack to send me a set of boards. I'm a bit slow at soldering as my only other experience is a few failed attempts at making LED boards. But slow and steady wins the race as they say. I'm hopefully going to keep posting up my progress or lack there off. I've a few photos of my first motor control board being soldered.

First component soldered on!

Making a bit of progress here...

All those big lads are finished at last...

This is as far as I got on the first night, hopefully I'll speed up a bit once I get a bit of practice.

This is the Wade's RepRap Darwin printing out a new extruder part. I believe nearly all the pieces of this extruder were printed on the machine using a previous head.

While I can't be down at the workshop I'm also playing around with the java host software. I've run into a dead end getting it to run my mac so I've set up a ubuntu image inside vmware fusion and I'm going to give that a shot. Failing that I'll see if I can get it to build inside eclipse. I hope they used maven :).