Thinking of building a Mendel…
Building the Makerbot Cupcake was pretty straightforward and it’s been a lot of fun playing with it. My biggest problem right now is the print envelope — 80mmx80mm is all you can realistically hope for, and that’s with a heated platform to control warpage. I’ve made some useful bits for my bike computer project and cranked out a bunch of new year’s ornaments, but other than that I haven’t been using it much. Everything I want to print is too big, either in terms of warpage or in terms of x/y size.
Since I’m interested in bigger things, so I’m looking into building bigger printers. (Anyone who wants to buy me a Stratasys can ask and I’ll give them the delivery address…) One option is to build a Mendel which has an envelope of 200mmx200mm. Another is to figure out how to put a print head on something really big, like a knee mill or a large CNC plasma table.