I have been keeping my eye on the burgeoning affordable DIY 3D printer scene for a while now. It's several years old by this point, and largely was kicked off as I recall by the reprap project, which is a project to create an open source self replicating 3D printer.  Since that time other projects such as cupcake CNC from makerbot have come on to the scene as well. 

If you are not familiar with 3D printing it is an additive manufacturing technology whereby 3D objects are printed by extruding plastics through an extruder head as in fused deposition modeling FDM or softening solid materials by layers as in selective laser sintering SLS as well as several other processes. It is commonly used for rapid prototyping of new product designs and more recently small scale home manufacturing. 

Why would you want a 3D printer you might ask? Seriously? You would ask that? Because we are geeks man and this kind of stuff is really cool to us. Actually, the whole vibe of the home fabrication DIY 3D printer community reminds me very much of the early days of the home computer revolution. I mean there are clubs swapping designs, ideas, and inspiration in the form of modern hackerspaces. And of course there are DIY build your own 3D printer kits much like there were DIY computer kits in the late 70s. It does have the feel of a home fab revolution and I want in. Also what's not cool about printing an object from a file on your computer to a real life 3D object?

The thing I was waiting for was a complete kit of the Mendel to be available from someone here in the US. The Mendel being the second generation of the reprap project design. The reason I wanted the reprap Mendel instead of the Makerbot CNC Cupcake was down to print area. The Mendel has a print area of 8 x 8 x 5.5 where as the Makerbot Cupcake CNC has a 3.8 x 4.25 x 4.52 build area. So for all practical purposes the Mendel has twice the print area in X and Y as Cupcake. And the reason I wanted a complete kit is I didn't want to take the time, or hassle with trying to track down all of the different parts from myriad suppliers to build one, AKA I am lazy that way. 

Today I found that Mendel complete kit from BotMill. I went ahead and ordered their Axis 2.1 3D printer kit which is a complete DIY Mendel kit with a heated bed (which reduces warpage for larger prints) for $1065.00. Also they had a 25$ off discount code on their blog (AXIS25). They also have a newer version of the same kit with a newer print head called the Axis 2.1 Plus at $1195.00 and a completely pre-assembled and tested plug and print version called the Glider 3.0 for $1395.00. 

I am really looking forward to diving in to this 3D printer world. I will post back here with a build log and or video and some sort of printing demonstration video so stay tuned.