What is this DIY 3D printer type?

There is many type of DIY 3D printer, basically if divided to printing material and the way printer head and bed is mounted.

Most common DIY 3D printer material is base on plastic filament like ABS or PLA, but there is other type that use powder or light sensitive UV resin.  UV resin base printer currently provide the best print resolution or quality, but the price of the printer as well as the resin is very high.  You can look at the detail from the Reprap 3D printer family tree below:

Since we will be focusing on the most common type of 3D printer that build by DIYer, we will be focusing on filament extruder type 3D printer.

In the filament extruder category, we can further divide the printer type by the way the print head and bed are mounted or move:

• X Head and YZ Bed, example: PrintBot
• XZ Head and Y Bed, example: Prusa
• XY Head and Z Bed, example: Darwin
• Z Head and XY Bed, example: CupCake 
• Polar: Fransisco
• Delta: Rostock
• Scara: SLS Wax printer

The first four type and use XYZ as the base of axis movement or cartesian coordinate system, the delta and polar using difference type of arm movement design. More detail could be found in the Reprap Drive Train wiki.

The way the printer head and bed are design will determine how the printer frame be constructed. Will talk about them in detail when we go into individual printer design discussion.

Next is the printer motion guide and power transmission, early motion guide is normally using linear bearing such as LM8UU and 8MM rod due to the cost, single LM8UU only cost less then 1 dollar, but recently we are seeing move to linear guide as price are getting cheaper, and it provide better accuracy compare to linear bearing, and it less noisy too.   For the power transmission side, it either lead screw or belt base, belt have better speed performance compare to lead screw, but in area that does not need speed like Z axis, it still prefer to use lead screw since it provide highly resolution.  There is two main type of screw design, normal lead screw or ball screw, ball screw normally have better accuracy due to elimination backslash. But price and availability limit it usage in DIY. If you can afford, ball screw really help to improve print quality, and new china supplier seem to reduce the price significantly.

Will continues tomorrow...