My 3D printer
If you plan on building an astromech, I highly recommend doing research on www.astromech.net. If you plan on 3D printing your droid, Michael Baddeley has a patreon page with tons of information. He has all the files for 3D printing a droid and freely shares them. It’s really great stuff. I am a patreon supporter of his and I would suggest throwing him a couple bucks for his trouble if you use his designs. It’s great stuff.
I’ve bought my first 3d Printer, and plan to use it for the majority of Artoo’s construction. I received my original Prusa I3 Mk2s in August and have been constantly printing ever since. My wife says that I need to give the printer a rest now and then. I say no…
I bought the kit from Prusa, so I could learn more about the printers from assembling it myself. It was also $200 cheaper to do it this way. I must say, I’m very glad that I did it like this. Once assembled, I started printing in PLA. If you’re just starting in 3D printing, that’s the filament to learn on. It’s very easy to get good prints.
To build Artoo, I wanted to use ABS plastic. First because it doesn’t have the issues deforming like PLA does when it gets hot and secondly the ease of acetone welding for connecting parts. You have to have an enclosure to print reliably in ABS. I build mine our of an Ikea Lack table and printed some PLA parts from thingiverse to put it together. I lined it with a metallic type reflective insulation. In order to get the ambient temperature up to around 50c, I had to stick a lamp with a 60 watt bulb inside. It works pretty well.
So after I was ready to print in ABS, I started printing parts. More to follow….