I went ahead and purchased the Prusa i3 MK3 kit it is back ordered until mid to late March. This gives me enough time to build a nice table beside my desk to hold it and the regular printer. I might make a blog post about building the table as well. I just need to measure it out and draw up what I want to build. I am not certain if I can find a reasonable table at Ikea or another furniture store. We will see how that comes together but I will need a place to put it that’s for certain. I was going to purchase the assembled version but after talking with Alex he convinced me to buy the kit. Alex is one of the FPV pilots we fly with. He was the one that got everyone from the lab to start flying. After talking with him I looked at the assembly manual they have online. It is very good with detailed step by step instructions. I really love the part of building drones so I figured I would probably really enjoy building the 3D printer kit since the instructions are so well written. I think the hard part is going to be learning to design the items I want to print. We will see how that goes. After talking with Pat about what he uses to design I think I will give OpenScad a try. It resembles a programming language type software so since I am a software engineer it might work really well for my way of thinking. We will see if I made a BIG mistake but I sure hope I did not. I also hope all of the family really like 3D printed things for Christmas! 🙂
Now I need to figure out what all types of filament I will need. What colors those need to be. I know for the quadcopter things I would like to print I do want them to be red. I had a red theme I was wanting to follow for the owl build but the red motors were out of stock for months and all they had was grey. I had to go with the grey or wait until they had the motors so grey they are! I have a couple ideas for printing things for that build. Pat has a camera protector that I would like to build and I would like to build a mount for the Lumenier AXII Stubby so it has more of an angle off the back of the top plate. I also would like to print some protective covers for the ends of the arms. I have seen those at races. They look cool but also protect the ends of the arms from scuffs. I am sure I can find lots of things to create I just hope I can figure out how to create them!